Verita Insights Magazine VIS magazine final | Page 16

MOE
FOSTERING LEARNING
COMMUNITIES WITH 
Mantle of the Expert
‘It makes me united to my class, as we are
always a team in Mantle.’ - Year 4 student
In a world where education is growing
increasingly more concerned about statistics and
test results than the students’ experience,
exploration and understanding of the world that
they live in, Mantle of the Expert turns the
concept of children as ‘commodities’ in
education on its head and focuses on building
collaborative and thriving learning communities
between students and teachers.
Mantle of the Expert supports children from all
backgrounds and cultures, and positions them as
agents in their own learning, allowing them to
explore the world through the medium of
authentic drama, within the framework of
Vygotsky’s social constructivist paradigm. With
the protective layer of drama, children can push
themselves further in their learning and become
risk takers, explorers and adventurers as they
navigate their mandated curriculum.
What is Mantle of the Expert?
Mantle of the Expert is a fictional based, drama
led inquiry approach to education which aims to
bring meaning and life to any curriculum and it
allows students to have ‘authentic’ experiences
in their learning by using drama conventions
and imagination to build a make-believe world,
where they can take on roles as if they are
experts (Taylor, 2016).
16  |   VERITA INSIGHTS
The teachers and the students work collaboratively
to co-construct a story which becomes the vehicle in
which they will navigate the curriculum together as
a learning community (ibid). The learning objectives
are carefully curated by the teacher in order to cover
the curriculum, who will then provoke the class with
a ‘hook’ (maps, photos, letters, audios, videos and
peculiar items) who will then begin to build a story
context around the item in the make-believe.
In Mantle of the Expert, children are inducted into
the drama in order to protect them. As curiosity can
be seen as the prototype of intrinsic motivation, it
can manage to sustain interest until the provocation
becomes clearer or acquires more meaning
(Bruner,1966 :114). The children are often inducted
into the drama through use of storytelling or with
the use of a provocation that stirs their curiosity.
Even with the use of provocation, the children are
positioned to have a choice in whether they
participate in the story or not. MOE is not a tool used
to impose learning upon children, but rather it is a
tool that is offered to them as something that they
might like to try (Taylor, 2016:24).
Mantle of the Expert is built around three
dimensions of imaginative inquiry: Drama for
Learning, Inquiry and a Mantle of the Expert. These
dimensions can work independently and
interdependently of each other.