Mantle of the Expert

Another curriculum design that is based upon the combination of the arts and science is the Mantle of the Expert (MoE), a method designed by Dorothy Heathcote.  Studying the arts and science linearly is said to allow learning to take place at a conceptual, personal and social level.  The MoE, like The Leonardo Effect, is a child led learning experience that places the teacher in the role of the facilitator, it is the responsibility of the child to extract information from the teacher, thus reversing the traditional style of learning (Heathcote & Herbert, 1985).  The syllabus is derived from a drama enterprise approach which draws its structure from societal matrixes (Grimley & Holt C of E Primary School, 2014).  Grimley and Holt C of E Primary School (2014) state that there are four key elements to the MoE method:

Ø  Expert roles are created and each child assumes one of the positions

Ø  A fictional organisation is created based on the subject area they will be studying

Ø  Client’s assign tasks to the experts which interlink with various areas of the curriculum

Ø  Through collective imagination and pupil inquiry the children develop the ability to solve challenges that they are faced with throughout the activity

Piaget stated that children, as constructivists, learn through experimentation and play.  The subject must become an extension of their environment in order for the knowledge to become a concrete schema (Gruber & Voneche, 1977).  It could be argued that through Heathcotes MoE method, the child is using all of the aforementioned skills to construct their own knowledge of the subject.  Therefore the emotional involvement in the activity will become embedded thus create a greater understanding and improved recall of the information; by creating a life like situation they are able to make ‘human-sense’ of the subject matter (Donaldson, 1978).

To explore the curriculum design further we were tasked with an activity based upon the MoE framework, enabling the group to gain first-hand experience.  The task consisted of building a bridge to replace the existing River Tawe Bridge in Swansea.  Using the aforementioned process each member of the group was given a role in which they would become the expert; Architect, Buyer and Estimator, Director, Project Manager and Structural Engineer.  The client required the bridge to be built using the following specifications:

Ø  Must cover a gap of 50cm’s

Ø  Must hold the weight of one average sized tangerine

Ø  Must be made from lollipop sticks and masking tape (although this was later amended to include the use of a hot glue gun due to the poor quality of the masking tape)

Ø  Each stick would cost fifty pence

Ø  Two inches of masking tape cost twenty five pence (each press of the glue gun trigger would also equate to two inches of masking tape)

Each group then designed, evaluated and built their bridge.   

Although there is evidence that the Mantle of the Expert curriculum design is effective in a primary education setting; Avenue Primary School, Norwich have dubbed MoE a “revolutionary approach to education (Burrell, 2007); I would argue the effectiveness of the method in older children and adults.  Throughout the experimental MoE task, assigned to myself and fellow second year university students, it was evident that the imagination aspect of the task in which the student would take on the role of an ‘expert’ was difficult to access.  However on the whole I found MoE to be effective in a primary setting, the way the children reacted to the method in the video indicated that young children have a greater access to their imagination and thus the ability to learn through role play.