Mantle of the Expert

Mantle of the Expert requires three teaching positions, and these are demonstrated by the twin “signs” of voice and physical stance and gesture. There are three negotiating positions:

1. The sustainer of the invented an enterprise. This is the manager/collaborator in the firm and keeps the play element seriously engaged. I do not mean ponderous or gloomy.
2. The second voice is that of the negotiator of our developing ideas, skills and responsibilities to our client
3. The playwright voice/planner which uses the amazing variety of possible human encounters to be planned and experienced in drama mode. Thus the teacher and student -- master/apprentice relationship sustains three levels of thought and action.

Mantle of the Expert. The Three Levels of Thought and Action/Purpose

A. Context: running an enterprise.  The supporting tasks of dealing with client, the day to day routines, car parking, advertising, taking collegiate decisions sustain POINT OF VIEW for all.

The sustaining of schooling generated from within the contextual demands. – not just the arbitrary school timetable.

B. Curriculum work required by students is introduced by the leader as needed by the enterprise above e.g. some “compass” understanding, learning new information, skills, researching, anything relevant to advancing student development.

C. The episodes which arise to point up crises, tension points, opportunities for encounters and to enable the “intelligence of feeling” to make the learning memorable and important. These create the opportunities for high level thinking, morality and decisions which shape the enterprise, such as meetings with clients, genuine experts in the community, officials the enterprise requires which are but later may require actual mentoring, officials from the community, witnesses, professionals, specially invented characters or clients. This level permits “safe adventures”, tensions to be explored, story, and plot lines to be woven into the enterprise and resolved in dramatic encounters, and then incorporated into the history of the firm.

Teacher contributions

Voice A: Manager of the enterprise.

Builds belief, creates action and detail of enterprise. Sustains deep play.

Voice B: Leader/Mentor.

Points out direction for more mastery of expert areas, whilst anchoring it all into the enterprise context. Working at skills.

Voice C: Engaged with special episodes of a wide range.

Playwright stance to empower students towards high order drama work. Constantly keeps Voice A as the context for all these experiences. (A sort of soap opera input!)

My next move into understanding was when I encountered the “Thomas Jefferson System of Education.⁷” I had long been disenchanted with the way teachers were using textbooks to augment their own factual information. I had been encouraging them to seek out primary sources -- archives, speeches, writings and paintings, biographies and autobiographies, so that children could feel more in touch with the period or personalities they were encountering. These resources seemed to make it natural to use roles in drama encounters. It also placed the materials rather than the teacher in the mediation position, so teacher and class could interrogate the information alongside each other. Thus the curriculum was engaged through case studies in context rather than the “over there” memory learning.

Oliver Van DeMille suddenly made me recognize the positions most useful in Mantle of the Expert work and how the power shift can be consciously achieved. I had naturally been doing this and teachers were saying things like “Well, you can do it, because it's your natural style” or “We're not inventive like you.” Armed with Thomas Jefferson, I have realized how quickly teachers can plan what their classes will be doing and create a wider range of tasks by which learning can happen. It still remains very subtle as to language styles and vocabulary, plus the arrangements of classrooms to reinforce the particular engagement with the tasks. The setting in of sign in the working environment.

The Thomas Jefferson System of Leadership, from “A Thomas Jefferson Education.” Oliver Van DeMille, 2000.

Suddenly, I could see why in Mantle of the Expert learning, the huge range of tasks, the theatre conventions⁸ , the ordering of information expertise and the mantle were endemic to the structure and thus changed the instinct to hold the power, to be the source of the knowledge. Once they embarked on Mantle mode, teachers felt free to invent tasks to enable learning. It also allowed individual children to reveal their needs (social, emotional and practical information) from within the fictional enterprise which protected them from ridicule or racist remarks. Further, the client becomes the case study from which derives the quality responsibility and ethical behavior. Lastly, children and teachers mentor each other.

Mantle teaching seems haphazard and demands much organization of tasks and focused preparation together with tracking the network shape of the learning. It is more like a river with streams, lakes, tributaries moving toward a wide estuary, than a railway with set lines of tasks and stops for reviewing till some learning and is accomplished. In ideal circumstances, it means long-term periods of time, team teaching and support systems, children constantly publishing when “plateaus” are reached from which they can verify they own their knowledge. Given these ideal conditions, schools would radically change in children's (and teachers’) lives. In and out of schooling would fuse. However, many teachers are managing to work for short and occasionally intensive periods of time. The result is consistent. Children become deeply engaged, take power and responsibility, face complex issues and decisions, communicate in a wide variety of ways, search for information and teach each other. Standards and the self-spectator⁹ emerge and social health improves. It is belief in the shifted context which wins these changes.

The student usually comes into the school doffing their private inner and family life with their coats and lunch bags. They remain people come to learn from teachers, and increasingly, the Internet. When students are engaged in Mantles with their clients, they leave “clock time” behind and enter the “sacred time” of being engaged directly in embracing the Mantle required by the enterprise.

Lastly, I am realizing the importance of selecting the context for this change of time from that of clock measurement to experiential time of being involved in doing. I realize I'm perverse and sometimes seem to go out of my way to make things difficult to prepare the learning resources. The context must be made believable and reasonable of accomplishing to the students, and the resources create the materials which are interrogated by teacher and class. These early preparations are crucial for they lay in the mandatory field of study. Later, class and teacher will create all other resources. These early preparations sometimes daunt teachers for they can seem excessive. The question I ask myself in seeking for learning contexts is “Why would we want the children to learn about these matters?” Seeking an answer gradually grows the context, and the context and social health of the class teaches me what I need to prepare to embark on the enterprise so they manage.