A TIE programme for infants for performance in a school hall for up to thirty-five children. A Theatre in Education Casebook:
This article presents a show for infants which was devised from an idea of a stage designer, a visual intelligence, inspired by the work of Edward de Bono on lateral thinking and thereby critical of the logic-bound values prevalent in the apprenticeship of maths at the time. The article was co-written by me with Bill Mitchell, later of Wildworks fame, and published in 1980 in Learning Through Theatre – essays and casebooks on Theatre in Education, ed. Tony Jackson, Manchester University Press, pp128-151
Pre-amble: The Perspectives Theatre Company
I was one of the founders of theatre collective The Perspectives TIE Team, which was formed initially by a group of five of us when students on the postgraduate drama course at Bretton Hall College in 1972. Aided by the generosity and foresight of two people, John Boylan – the drama adviser for Cambridgeshire, and Terry Palmer – the director of the newly-built Key Theatre in Peterborough, the team became attached to that theatre in 1973 as a professional company funded by a small grant from the drama adviser, and known as the Key Perspectives Theatre Company.
In 1976, when It Fits was devised, the company comprised nine members: seven performers and two designers; and was then in receipt of additional funding from Peterborough City Council and the Arts Council as well as from the drama adviser.
The policy of the Company was outlined in 1978 in the following terms:
- The company sees theatre as a medium of communication and entertainment that directly reflects the community it serves.
- We respond to a demand for theatre within the community by working in venues such as schools, community centres, clubs, pubs, etc.
- The work we offer is based on ideas and issues which are of concern to that community. All the work is of a broadly educational nature and we see TIE as a part of our community theatre work.
- We perform free of charge wherever possible, except when outside our own area.
One of the ultimate aims of the company (as stated in 1978) was to help create a society based on self-determination and equality. The way in which this Company organised itself should reflect this ideal. In its organisation the company had always been a co-operative and worked continuously to maintain the value of the contribution of the individual within a team structure, as a working model of practical socialism.
Since 1979 the company’s policy and its freedom to exercise some control over work done and working methods had been strengthened and formalised by the establishment of the team as an independent company separate from the Key Theatre.
The Show Scenario
It Fits was devised and first presented in 1976, and revised and re-presented in 1977. The team members involved directly during the two runs of the programme, as actor-teachers or devisers or both, were: Colin Hicks, Phil Williams, Chris Adamson, and Bill Mitchell (design).
Primary aim: to encourage children to solve problems of shape and colour with a ‘divergent’ approach. Cast: Two characters – Bill and Phil, a comic pair of ‘delivery men’.
A four-foot cube of ‘bricks’ contained in a Dexion frame is set up in the school hall.
Two characters enter the school: they are dressed in ‘bib and brace’ overalls and bowler hats. They are called Bill and Phil.
Bill is easy-going, cooperative, interested in whatever the children say or do, and generally ‘illogical’ in his approach to problems. Phil, however, is more formal, more of an authority figure; he’s in charge and can be rather officious at times; is always ‘logical’ in his approach to problems. (For a more detailed analysis of the characters and their functions, see teachers’ notes, p.143).
Phil goes to the classroom to introduce himself to the children, who have not been told that a TIE company is coming to their school. Phil explains that their ‘bricks’ have arrived from the brickworks, and that he and his friend Bill are delivery men and would like their help in unloading them. The children follow him into the school hall where Bill introduces himself, and displays the packed cube of ‘bricks’.
The ‘bricks’ are a number of lightweight shapes of different colours and sizes. The colours are yellow, red, green and blue. The shapes are: cubes, cuboids, triangular prisms, cylinders, and an odd shape. The framework is on wheels to enable the whole structure to be moved or rotated when necessary (fig. 1). Bill points out all the various colours and shapes to the children.
The background to It Fits
The team had by 1976 established a very strong reputation locally for the quality of its schools work, particularly due to a flexible policy of responding to teachers’ individual requests and to a well-informed clarity about its educational aims. One of those aims was to provide a ‘child-centred’ stimulus in schools which could help the child to understand subject matter and play an active part in learning processes not usually taught within the education system.
The team found itself faced with a contradiction. TIE springs from a radical position that sees the structures of learning to be child-centred, team taught and cross-curricular, advocating co-operative and collective activities; whereas the school system, especially at higher age levels, perpetuates hierarchies of teacher organisation, competitiveness, and ‘closed’ subject areas and tends to emphasise (in our view) the inferiority of the student. It Fits was one attempt by the team to resolve that contradiction. It was in many ways a pivotal point in the development of the company’s thinking.
We decided, therefore, as our first aim in this programme, to construct a child-centred project demanding 100 per cent participation from the children; secondly, to demonstrate that TIE could generate a valuable stimulus for learning in areas other than just English or Drama; and, thirdly, to bring the visual and tactile experiences of children right into the heart of a TIE programme.
The evolution of this programme also needs to be seen against the more mundane but even more pressing background of funding and scheduling. In order to implement the difficult educational aims it had set for itself the team might reasonably have been expected to muster and maximise all its resources.
The programme was however devised and performed by only two people, with the aid of a designer.
Why?
The working schedule of a theatre company or TIE team results in part from an effort to resolve yet other pressures, the external pressures, that is, exerted from its grant-aiding bodies. From the team’s point of view the quality and quantity of its provision depends upon the money in the bank. In 1976 the Perspectives team were funded from three sources: the Arts Council ({13,000); Peterborough City Council (£8,000); and Cambridgeshire LEA The team’s policy was to be a theatre and education service to as many of the Greater Peterborough community as possible and we therefore visited Infant, Junior and Secondary schools, Special schools, Youth clubs, pubs. clubs, community halls and OAP homes. No funding body, though, would totally fund this work, nor would any of them guarantee continued subsidy beyond that financial year.
Each funding body has its own criteria for granting funds and the company had always to decipher what funding bodies wanted for their money. TIE occupied a middle ground between ‘arts’ and ‘education’ and could not clearly be allied to either, which led the team into fruitless definitions of what separated (rather than united) artistic and educational activities. We were to discover that the Arts Council viewed such programmes as It Fits as ‘teaching’ not ‘acting’, and this programme came in for considerable criticism from Arts Council observers based on what the team felt to be a pointless distinction.
The difficulty was exacerbated, in a year of gross inflation and economic gloom, by the prospect of substantial cuts both in the education budget and in the Arts Council grant for the forthcoming year. From our discussions with these funding bodies – apart from the County drama adviser with whom we have always had a special relationship – we gained the impression that quantity rather than quality of work was paramount if our survival was to be assured.
At the same time the team was producing new shows (for schools, the theatre, or the community) roughly once every six weeks, and at this rate of production we knew we could not maintain the standard of our work at the level we wished. A lowering of standards would not only worry us but would jeopardise our grants still further. We were in a cleft stick. Any cutback by us in our service to Peterborough would provide an excuse for a cutback in the grant. Conversely, if we didn’t reduce our output the quality of our work would suffer and we would be in danger of a grant cut-back anyway.
The team decided to solve this ‘Catch-22’ situation by splitting the team for a period, which would enable us to bring in an additional project without having to reduce the time available for preparation. Thus three people worked on It Fits while the other team members worked on a youth club show. It reassured us to know that there were precedents for this way of working, and that one excellent ‘two-hander’ for infants, Coventry’s Pow Wow, had resulted from a major well-established team.
The team and ‘divergent thinking’
The company had often visited a local primary school in the village of Upwood in Cambridgeshire, where the work of Edward de Bono was considered of great importance by the headteacher. Thinking was consciously taught in the school, and structures for learning based on ‘lateral’ or ‘divergent’ models, as advocated by de Bono, were being used intelligently by staff and pupils alike. (The words ‘divergent’ and lateral’ are virtually interchangeable but the former was more usually favoured was.) The school’s response to our previous programmes had been very encouraging and there was a feeling of some affinity between the educational objectives of both the team and the school.
Several members of the team had themselves for some while been interested in divergent thinking, and had wondered how thinking methods might be consciously taught and explored through theatre techniques. We had never before tackled either science or any other subject area that did not come under the umbrella of English, Drama or Social Studies, and ‘thinking’ seemed to offer a long-sought opportunity to cross the curriculum barriers.
‘Convergent’ or ‘Linear’ thinking, as we understood the concept, was the traditional method of analysing answers into right or wrong categories. It was a rigid method of thinking imposed at a very early stage in a child’s development which did not allow the child to participate in the learning process, only to receive and comprehend the rules and then apply them. ‘Divergent’ thinking, however, is (as de Bono argues) a continuation of a child’s innate intelligence: it is a practical thinking tool. Instead of a question having merely a right or wrong answer, the answer given must be measured against a different criterion: that of a degree of function. All answers are accepted but how well do they work and what are the consequences of them? Are some answers more useful than others?
Politically, we felt this new approach to thinking to be of great importance to the development of a person as he/she struggles through our present education system and society at large. Thinking as a subject in its own right has as yet no recognised place within the education curriculum. Thinking in a linear way, whether taught through mathematics or more subliminally in other subjects and bolstered by the examination system, represents the teacher-centred nature of our education. To teach ‘divergent’ thinking at least obliges one to recognise the child as a child and as the centre of the learning process.
[Ed Note: More detailed explanation of de Bono’s ideas and their relevance to It Fits was given in the teachers’ notes reproduced on p. 142 of the book. The reader seeking a more comprehensive definition of divergent thinking should read Dr de Bono’s books CORT Thinking and Teaching Thinking.]
The role of the designer
The Company, in 1976, was slowly discovering the potential of using a specialist designer with a direct creative input rather than as some body who contributed the secondary function of set decorator or props gatherer. The company decided to explore the concept of programmes with a strong visual focus. The design contribution to It Fits will be explained in the following section.
Devising It Fits
Three interested members of the team began to develop the programme in April 1976. There followed a week of discussion where three content areas – divergent thinking, a Science programme, and a design-based project – were simultaneously discussed. We bought several books including the Cognitive Research Thinking Course devised by Dr de Bono and the ESA Catalogue (see booklist).
On perusal of this latter catalogue of educational material for young children it became obvious to us that in the broad area of science, the new maths with its extensive use of colour and shape, was eminently stageable and that here, potentially, was a set of fun activities that not only made maths accessible to any level of ability (one of our educational aims and a TIE tenet) but was actually the beginnings of the teaching of a method of thinking. We were surprised at our own discovery that maths is the teaching of thinking, but also that it is taught in a convergent way.
Our readings of de Bono had raised a doubt in our minds as to the benefits of this convergent attitude to the mathematical process so we decided to have a mixture of both systems running through the programme to see if we could help the child explore the relationship between his or her natural propensity for the divergent thinking process and the imposed teaching of a convergent, logical and self-satisfying approach encountered in the classroom.
We had the idea of posing a physical problem that could not be solved in a convergent linear way (conventional maths) – one that could only be solved
“laterally”. We would thus be reaffirming the superiority of the child’s innate divergent thinking process.
Parallel to this discussion, we started developing visual ideas based on the Fletcher and Bulmershe maths system. Both maths systems utilise convergent thinking as their teaching process, although whereas Bulmershe uses 2-D names and shapes, Fletcher uses 3-D. They teach shape and colour using tessilation and sets, giving the children a closed system of choice between right and wrong answers. For example, a teacher using these systems was worried when we explained that a one-toot cylinder fitted into a one-toot cube space. She thought that we were teaching children the ‘wrong’ answer according to the rules of tessilation, even when presented with the physical evidence that cylinder did fit! Not one child, throughout the run, made any distinction between the task of fitting the blocks together and the fact that the cylinders did not tessilate.
The designer, after examining the 2-D systems and 3-D systems of the Bulmershe and Fletcher schemes respectively, proposed a 3-D structure that the children could relate to directly rather than a 2-D visual aid, as the best means of achieving the educational aims. We also felt it important to identify ourselves with a growing body of educationists who reasoned that, as the child inhabits a three-dimensional world, the use of two-dimensional objects was counter-productive.
The visual stimulus
We decided that the mathematical experience that the children would participate in must be represented by a simple and obviously effective single structure which would both be the problem and also demonstrate the problem, to stimulate the children’s creative thinking.
The design structure must be light, strong, colourful and large enough, so that an infant would not have to handle the objects self-consciously or need help in manipulation. The structure also needed to break up into units, so as to share the problem with the whole class, as well as presenting a practical need to fit the parts together again.
The educational theory of divergence gave us another pointer to the design problem. It had to be capable of being re-assembled in more than one way. We therefore rejected any jigsaw puzzle or chinese box puzzle ideas and finally arrived at a massive four-foot cube structure bigger than any infant. This was made up of forty rigid, flame retardant polystyrene blocks, based on a one-foot cube unit. These blocks were all geometric variations of the basic cube unit; triangular prisms, cubes, cuboids, and cylinders of various proportions.
A four-foot cube contains sixty-four one-foot cube units. By adding some together to form two-foot and four-foot cuboids, cutting others in half diagonally to form one-foot right-angled triangular prisms and making various cylinders, we achieved our required number of units which fitted snugly together into a four-foot cage-like framework. By fixing casters to the bottom of the frame we made the whole structure mobile (see Fig. 1).
Each block was then covered in a gauzy material, sized and painted in one of three colours. We chose red, yellow, and green emulsion. This process protected them from the buffeting they would endure during the three-week run.
Although the structure would be exciting for the children, it was, at this initial stage of shape and colour setting, only a convergent problem. A solution could be achieved by convergent means, and the divergent process by-passed. To challenge this possibility, one of the blocks was specially designed to defy any attempt at convergent classification and linear problem-solving. This block was a hybrid of most of the basic shapes, combining a four-foot cuboid with a one-foot cube in one plane, and a one-foot triangular prism attached in a different plane (see Fig. 3). It was painted blue – a recognisable colour for the children to identify, but completely different from the other three colour ‘sets’. This simple idea now made the aims of the programme viable. Only by thinking creatively and divergently about this ‘problem’ piece could the whole cube be reassembled.
Discussions were held with the Maths Advisers and the warden of Stapleford Maths Centre in Cambridgeshire, and also with a member of de Bono’s team from Cambridge University. These were to verify the correctness of our interpretation both of the new maths and of lateral thinking. It was agreed, too, to put on the first show at Upwood School with the headteacher and infant staff present for their comment on the efficacy of the programme.
Role of the teacher and the teachers’ notes
As we were attempting to integrate the role of the teacher in the follow-up work, it was necessary for all teachers to attend a pre-programme workshop where explanations were given of the aims, principles and form the programme would take, and teachers’ notes supplied. Preparatory work with the children is essential for this programme: the terms and definitions the actor-teachers use must be the same that the teachers use in the classroom. Schools using the Fletcher Maths course will have no problem with this, but not all infant children are familiar with 3-D shapes. At the workshop teachers were also urged to observe the programme with their class and to discuss its effect with the team when it had ended.
Mathematics and lateral thinking
This programme has its roots in three different systems of thinking advocated in informal teaching methods. One from the Bulmershe Mathematical Programme, the second from the Fletcher Mathematics for Schools and the other from the research of the Cognitive Research Trust and Edward de Bono in Cambridge.
Mathematics is based on logic, and the concern of educationalists is to instil in very young children its basic principles. A quick perusal of the ESA Creative Learning catalogue for 1976, Vital Years, reveals the process of maths education and its main elements.
A basic principle is that a child learns through play. At the pre-school stage he is given games designed to help co-ordination, visual discrimination and shape recognition. He is given a set of shapes to ‘post’ into a box, unstructured materials to sort and set by shape and colour. The basic shapes are circle, square, rectangle and triangle in bright primary red, blue, and yellow. Through educative play the child is becoming accustomed to the basic tools and processes necessary to maths.
The Fletcher Mathematical process follows on from this point examining tessilation, logic, sets, sub-sets, matching, relations and functions. Play is still allowed, but strengthened by an admitted structure as basic mathematical logic. There are still the three colours and the four shapes, but with the added properties of varying size and thickness. The children grow accustomed through play to unconsciously identifying objects according to shape, colour, size, thickness in simple positive/negative terms – somewhat akin to computer processes.
The child is now well equipped to deal with ‘recognisable’ maths and we see the first introduction of arithmetic, numbers, calculations (Cuisenaire rods provide an excellent transition from educative play to calculation), money, shops and measurement.
The whole process of this learning is logical, one foot in front of the other, one brick on top of the other.
Edward de Bono advocates a different system of thinking called Lateral thinking! He feels that logical thinking has an inherent growth-inhibiting factor. Take the equation 6 + 2 – . Once the child cracks the code of numbers and maths signs and learns the principle of simple addition, he arrives at the solution: 6 + 2 = 8. This he learns is ‘right’. There is only one right answer to this equation. But what if it were presented ‘back to front’: 8=…? There are several right answers (7 + 1, 6 + 2,5 + 3, 4 + 4, etc.). Lateral thinking considers all aspects of a problem, admits of all possibilities and accepts several right answers. By considering the equation back-to-front the depth of learning inherent in the equation, hidden by a logical approach, becomes apparent.
De Bono argues that one should explore the child’s output skills rather than its input skills. In his own words, input depends ‘on a combination of features, (recognisable in logical maths teaching): attention; interest; speed of understanding; an ability to perceive relationships; a habit of classification; and a framework that arises from a well-stocked larder’. Output depends on skills such as ‘assessing priorities, taking decisions, settling for the practical, seeing other points of view’ (‘High-power thinkers with low-power IQ, in The Observer, 25 April 1976). The supporting argument for this thesis is that there is a greater need for output skills, since for most decisions we have only time to use available knowledge effectively, rather than absorb new knowledge.
The programme
There are aspects of both these systems which it seemed interesting to us to juxtapose and which we wished to explore, by allowing teachers to observe the two systems in operation with their own class and see how their children reacted to these approaches.
We aim to provide the child with opportunities for problem solving, decision making, risk taking, curiosity, originality, flexibility, gaining experience in perception and dealing with open questions and complexity.
All this, unhampered by differences in speed of response or ability to read.
(Brief outline was given here of the scenario.]
The two delivery men, Bill and Phil, are a comic pair who provide the children with a lot of enjoyable fun. They contain in their characters the varied aspects inherent in the two systems of thought. This will provide the teacher with an opportunity to observe which approach each child most readily responds to. A small analysis of their character reveals this:
| Bill | Phil |
| Co-operative Child-centred | Competitive |
| Informal | Adult-centred |
| Positive thinker | Formal |
| Lateral | Negative thinker |
| Controlled freedom | Logical |
| Divergent | Discipline |
| Open questions | Convergent |
| ‘Stupid’ | Closed questions |
| ‘Brainy’ |
The children have seen the cube whole, therefore it must be possible to build a cube out of the various shapes. The cube has an inherent logic of its own – it is a perfect cube, the multiple of its composite shapes is constant, they can only build a cube, not a 2-dimensional object, a triangle, circle or rectangle. The children will eventually discover the logical solution to the problem (i.e. the case will be packed) but through a system that encourages the use of divergent thinking. The solution will be one of several possibilities. The puzzle is so constructed that an easy solution using logical systems is not possible. By a process of divergent thinking, based on convergent thinking, the solution should be reached.
Apart from this basic exploration of how children reach decisions, the cube has other implications. The 3-D shape is a way of contributing the third dimension to the child’s appreciation of problems. It increases the complexity, but affords a correspondingly greater number of solutions than would a 2-D model.
Fitting the shapes together to form a cube, calls on skills of tessilation. But here the child will discover a shape that will not tessilate – the circle. Ordinary logic will tell him to discard the shape, but having seen it come from the packing case originally it must fit. He is forced to consider the problem from a different viewpoint (laterally), and may find that there is no problem – the circles are not meant to tessilate, they are treated as rounded cubes.
Of course we do not expect the child to reason explicitly in this way, but these examples serve to demonstrate that It Fits is based on encouraging a lateral approach to a problem that has a logical solution.
Evaluation
By the end of its run, It Fits had chalked up some very real achievements and the company had made many discoveries about TIE. In retrospect, however, the company considered the programme to have been only partially successful.
Some of the weaknesses were easily rectifiable, some were due to circumstances beyond our control, while some were inherent in the structure of the programme itself.
In describing how It Fits was devised, we have also suggested the factors which inhibited the long term success of the project. One of the aims of the programme was to demonstrate to Infant teachers the educational benefits of children thinking divergently, to demonstrate clearly and simply a child-based learning process, which the teachers could adopt and continue in the classroom.
Time
Unfortunately, because of the economic pressures, and therefore the amount of work the company was committed to producing, as well as the teachers’ own workload, not enough time was spent informing the teachers and establishing a working relationship with them before the project. As a result, relatively little of the preparatory or follow-up work we had envisaged being done was actually done.
This problem was compounded by the teachers having no previous knowledge of de Bono’s ideas, by a large measure of conservatism among many of them regarding the teaching of maths and its relationship to divergent thinking, and by the fact that, at the end of each performance, the company had to pack up immediately in order to get to the next school, allowing no time for discussion with the class teachers.
The rest of the team were already committed to their own separate project, and nobody could be spared to follow up any problems or suggestions that It Fits had stimulated.
One decision taken during the devising period also proved to have an adverse effect on the programme during its first run. With the wisdom of hindsight, it was avoidable. It Fits was devised to evolve at the speed that would allow the children to grasp the problem. Our concern, however, about the likely attentiveness of five-to-seven-year-olds made us assume that an hour would be acceptable for sustaining their interest. Longer than an hour could mean that their concentration on the problem would be lost. Also, by limiting ourselves to one hour we would be able to visit three schools per day and so cover all infant schools in the Peterborough area within our three-week tour – thereby impressing, we hoped, our funding bodies as well as fulfilling our schools commitment to the maximum. In practice we found this rigid time-limit led to a worrying inflexibility, with some unfortunate repercussions upon the divergent structure of the programme.
First, not enough time or sensitivity was given to groups during the tower-building section, especially when the tasks set for each colour group were completed. We realised it would have been valuable to have spent more time on helping the children understand why the tower stayed up or fell down. The opportunity to allow each group to tackle all three tasks in turn so as to prove that different solutions were equally valid was not possible, again because of time.
Secondly, the re-packing of the frame at the end – when the divergent approach should become most evident – was often reduced merely to an empirical trial-and-error exercise policed by the actor-teachers with an eye on the clock. Everyone got frustrated if we ran out of time and the re-packing had not been completed. The driving need to see the cube packed and finished overrode the development of any of the kinds of thinking we were trying to explore. The actors would often tend to speed up the children’s decisions and pounce on certain answers which they knew would complete the re-packing task within the hour – which of course undermined the fundamental aim.
Lastly, we found it impossible, while we were working with the children, to evaluate their quality of thinking. This had much to do with our limited personnel resources: two actor-teachers had to extract all the creative ideas from thirty or more children in fifteen minutes. Working with smaller groups of, say, five or six children per group, would have been ideal.
Teacher Notes
It seemed that many teachers had been intimidated by our Teachers Notes. We could certainly have been of more use, both before the run and after each performance, in helping the teacher understand the concepts we were grappling with and the vast amount of information which had been extracted during our research. Thus, although we had advised teachers to work on the language of the geometric shapes before our visit, it soon became apparent that the extent to which children had been prepared varied enormously from school to school. Some teachers were unwilling to adopt the 3-D terms, claiming that ‘triangle’ is an easier word for children to learn than ‘prism’. As the early sections of the programme depended upon a commonly-understood set of terms, the actor-teachers often had to mount concentrated teaching sessions so as to get the information across instead of just reinforcing that information as was planned.
All these were to a large extent faults that could be remedied – that is, by a more flexible allocation of time (though the constraints upon us in this respect were enormous) and better liaison with teachers in advance of the programme.
Intractable Weaknesses
There were several further weaknesses, however, that proved more intractable. The original scheme had seemed eminently simple. The two characters, one a logical thinker, the other a lateral thinker, would embody the basic conflict of ideas within the show. As explained on page 132 of the book, the first version incorporated a large transparent plastic floor-cloth (an adaptation of the Bulmershe Maths ‘railway line’ system for teaching setting), which came with the cube as a set of instructions. These instructions would not allow for the odd-shape, so the lateral thinker would take over and, without the rules and aided by the children, re-form the cube just in time to leave and deliver it to the right address. Neat and simple. But when the show was on the road it was found that the lateral-logical opposition did not work quite as planned. It was difficult just to be ‘lateral’ without far greater preparation. And according to the level of group with whom the team was working, both ‘Bill’ and ‘Phil’ found it necessary to alternate between lateral and logical roles at the expense of their characterisation.
A central theme of the programme was the non-classifiability of the ‘rogue’ block. Insufficient time was given, however, for the class to explore its difference and what its basic shapes were. A swift acknowledgment that it was different, that it posed a problem and then its later assimilation back into the frame, were expediently dealt with. The strangeness of this particular block could have been a graphic demonstration of the de Bono argument that lateral thinking is a valuable way of assimilating problems.
One teacher, interestingly, told us that nothing in our programme undermined logical mathematics since, first, we had rigged logic not to work through our shape and colour coding (the cube was built and painted to make it impossible to reassemble according to accepted infant maths systems of logic) and, secondly, even our odd shape, though defying infant description, was a mathematically explicable shape and logically was in a set all of its own and could therefore be included. The comment was refreshing in its criticism and welcomed as such, though the point we were trying to make was not so much that the block was absolutely unclassifiable but that at infant level different methods of approach were needed to solve the problem it posed.
Positive Points
What, then, were the positive points of the programme? While the ‘divergent’ approach in practice may have fallen a little short of our original aims, children working on the three colour-group tasks generally did so in a genuinely co-operative way, by trial and error, give and take – ‘divergently’ as far as could be gauged. Generally, too, the children realised that colour and shape were not immediate clues to the re-assembly of the cube. The ‘rogue’ block was also successful in stopping routine ‘linear’ thinking and did make them re-think the problem.
We believe too, that It Fits demonstrated some significant further possibilities in TIE:
- TIE can deal with subjects other than English, Drama, History and Social Studies. It Fus did manage to open up fresh ways of looking at, and grasping, mathematical concepts and relating them at the same time to alternative, ‘divergent’ methods of dealing with the world around us. This was theatre as a means to an end, an educational tool rather than an art form per se, in the most vivid terms. The experience gave us sufficient confidence to continue further in this direction (see ‘postscript’), and we hope that our schools service can manage to cut across subject barriers more consistently in the future.
- It is possible for the visual element in a TlE programme to be an important and integral part of the content of the lit experience rather than relegated to a decorative role as is usual in theatre and in TIE companies. TIE is in a special position to raise the status of the design contribution because of its direct contact with its audience, allowing for a tangibility and immediacy of experience unusual in most other forms of theatre. The design element in It Fits was undoubtedly the central and dynamic ingredient of the programme.
- The actor-teacher need not always be the main focus of attention in TIE, as in It Fits he certainly was not. The design was stimulus enough for the children not to get bored, the actor-teachers realised that their characterisation, outlined in the scenario and teachers’ notes, frequently got in the way. So that to play their roles, either for control of the children’s attention, or for pure entertainment, was an unnecessary complication. By playing themselves the actors found a more direct contact with the children, which then allowed the children to fulfil a more active role in the programme.
- We demonstrated that a ‘child-centred’ programme could provide teachers with plenty of follow-up material and could be educationally as challenging as conventional subject material.
Generally the teachers found It Fits a useful insight into the thinking processes of their class. They found it a valuable experience to be objective, and watch somebody else working on a practical thinking problem with their children.
Although we felt that for many teachers the point of the programme was not clear, there was widespread enthusiasm for the blocks themselves which they considered invaluable as a teaching aid and which they would like to have made use of in their own maths work.