hoping someone can stop this,
He is afraid that telling will make it worse,
that people will talk about him and think there is something wrong with him,
afraid that the teacher won’t take him seriously,
that there will be nothing any one can do to help
and it will just go on and on...As the players verbalise the hidden thoughts of the character, they fashion a
complex and compassionate interpretation of the character. The questioning device
presumes a multiplicity of answers and hence a poly-vocal response is created. The
class re-teaches the persona of‘student’and the position of the help-seeker who
struggles with the barriers of shame and hopelessness.
The Teacher’s Hidden Thoughts follow:
She thinks she hasn’t got time for this.
She is ashamed because she doesn’t know what to do.
She is afraid that she will mess this up,
that she will let the kid down,
that even if she tries to help she will be no use.
She is wishing she could help,
wishing someone could tell her what to do,
wishing the problem could just have a happy ending,
wishing that the student did not have to suffer
wishing that school could just be about learning,
wishing they had taught her how to deal with this when she was still at Uni...
The text of the Hidden Thoughts both emerges from and disrupts the stereotype of
unsupportive teacher that we had previously seen played. The Hidden Thoughts
reveal that the teacher too is afraid. She feels under-prepared, and concerned
because she wants to help but does not know how. The collective re-interpretation
speaks a different teacher into being. She is re-fashioned, shifting from unsup-
portive or not-caring, to unsupported and caring.
Where the naturalistic paradigm favours a more logically coherent and unitary
sense of the individual and tends to replicate the type, the“Hidden Thoughts Game”
invites an embodied poly-vocality. In this is a particularly powerful mechanism for
deconstruction and reconstruction. The players work to speak wide the possibilities
of the self. This assists in the crossing of the victim–villain definitional boundary.
Rather than demonise, valorize, or patronise the characters, this device assists
players to humanise them. In this way, use of a learning activity inspired by
post-structuralist theory evokes a more generous understanding of the characters.
216 H. Cahill and J. Coffey