Dorothy Heathcote - Academic Work

Academic Work

In 1951, Heathcote was appointed, completely out of the blue, as a staff tutor at the Durham Institute by Brian Stanley. Stanley took a huge risk employing such an inexperienced teacher. She had no formal education, no national teacher qualification and virtually no experience of teaching children.

Over the next 10 years Heathcote's reputation grew as more and more people saw her teach using her remarkable approach.

From the beginning her work was considered unorthodox. In his biography, Dorothy Heathcote's Story, Gavin Bolton describes the reaction at the time, "it was anathema to drama specialists, both the traditionalists who saw her work as rejecting real theatre and the progressives who thought she broke all the rules on which Child Drama was founded."

In 1964 Heathcote started teaching a full-time Advanced Diploma course at Newcastle University. In 1979 this alternated yearly with a full-time M.Ed course. In the twenty-two years, until Heathcote's retirement from Newcastle in 1986, these courses became among the most influential university courses in the country.

In 1966 her work first appeared on film in Death of a President, a BBC documentary of a drama production she made with boys from a local approved school; in acting out the play the young offenders are made aware of how the consequences of one individual's actions can impact upon the community. She very quickly became known to a much wider audience and began extensively travelling abroad to teach and lecture in other countries. In 1972 Heathcote was featured on Omnibus in a documentary film celebrating her work called (rather fittingly), Three Looms Waiting.

Gavin Bolton has suggested that towards the end of the 1960s Heathcote's work experienced, what he calls, a sea change as she "moved away from her dramatically and educationally successful use of making up a play, to being a creator of pictures in which she became a fellow reader along with the class." This new way of working required her and her students to spend a great deal of time working in hospitals for the severely handicapped and criminal institutions for young men.

A further sea change occurred in the early 1980s, which brought Heathcote back into schools. The drama approach she had called, Mantle of the Expert, she designed specifically for teachers who had little experience of drama, "I introduced mantle of the expert work when I was trying to help teachers who didn't understand creating tension by being playwrights and to cut out the need for children having to act, or express feelings and behave like other people".