Week 13 Drama 3

Drama 3: Teaching-in-role & Mantle-of-the-expert

In our finial Creative Arts workshop this semester, we focused on teaching-in-role and mantle-of-the-expert as two effective teaching strategies we could use in our future teaching. When I was in Year 10, the teaching-in-role strategy had been used in Literacy class by my teacher. The teacher dressed as a witch and taught us about Macbeth. That teaching strategy made us felt very different from the sterotypes of teaching and learning, hence I agree that involving the ‘teaching in role’ strategy would help engaging and focusing students’ interest and attention on the lesson. It would also encourage students’ higher order thinking about the lesson content.

A picture of Macbeth and three witches.

As the teacher models in the class and teachs in role, students could be enabled to “walk in someone else’s shoes and at the same time confirming the importance of their own understanding and experiences” (Ewing, R. & Simons, J., 2004, p. 31). Both teaching in role and mantle of the expert are useful activity to encourage students’ interests in learning, but I would like to do teaching in role more than mantle of the expert in my future teaching since the idea is more common and easier to be accepted by students from different ages and levels of abilities.

References:
Ewing, R. & Simons, J. (2004). Beyond the script: Drama in the classroom, take two. Newtown, NSW: PETA.

Week 12 Drama 2

Drama 2: Play-building

In this workshop, we focused on scaffolding and sequencing learning experiences in drama. We began the workshop with the pretext Green Children. We did a serial of activities to comprehend the pretext including still image, group mapping, role-walking, hot-seating and ritual enactment. There was a strong continuity rbetween the role-walk activity and hot seating activity and they were the parts I felt most engaging.

As students created a map of an imaginary town where people brought the two green children to, students used their prior knowledge of community, science and economics aspects. Then in role walking, students explored deeper about their roles in particular situations as well as the connection between their roles and the green children. While communicating with other people about their roles, students could collect information from other roles to comprehend the story and their relationship with others. This links into the KLA requirement that students learning to make drama need to “take on and sustains roles in a variety of drama forms to express meaning in a wide range of imagined situations” (Board of Studies, 2006, p. 26). To further expand students understanding of a particular situation, three students were picked to sit on the hot seat in the front of the class and the rest of us questioned their characters in role. These sequenced activities encouraged students’ imagination of different situations, critical thinking and oral skills. A student-centred activity like hot-seating “changes the dynamic in the classroom because the teacher is not providing an evaluating feedback loop” (Ewing & Gibson, R., p. 56). Activities like role-walk and hot-seating are very helpful to build students’ creativity and literacy comprehension during playing and making drama.

References:

Gibson, R. & Ewing, R. (2011). Transforming the curriculum through the Arts. Palgrave Macmillan: Melbourne.

NSW Board of Studies. (2006). Creative Arts K-6 Syllabus. Sydney: BOS.

Week 11 Drama 1

Drama 1: Programming Drama

Our first Drama workshop was extremely useful for us to do with Literacy in future teaching. It was about programming drama. Programming drama is defined in Transforming the Curriculum as “a term used to describe the use of a range of theatre strategies to enable participants to make meanings” (Ewing & Gibson, 2011, p.236). In the tutorial, Victoria introduced this topic with a picture book named Voices in the Park by Anthony Browne. This picture book had been previously used in our EDUP1001 or EDUP2002 as a Literacy teaching resource, but I did not thought about combining Drama and Literacy by using this particular picture book before this tutorial. The reason was the book had four different voices and points of view, I thought it would be difficult to manage an activity covered any type of Creative Arts. Hence it was very necessary for us as preserved teachers to learn how to use drama strategies to develop critical literacy and thinking skills across the primary curriculum.

"Role on the Wall"  was an easy-accessing activity that I found extremely helpful in developing students’ literacy comperhension and critical thinking skill. Victoria drew two simple frames of the two main characters in Voices in the Park on the whiteboard. Students were asked to write an adjective, poetic phrases, similes or metaphor to describe each character and post the sticky notes onto the frames. While students were thinking critically and analytically into the roles of certain characters, their literacy skills and banks of vocabulary would be developed. Since the sticky notes did not label students’ names, as they heard the teacher reading the answers out they would not feel awkward and be confident to express their ideas. Because “Role on the Wall” was a very helpful activity to develop students’ creativity, critical thinking and literacy, I had covered it in my EDUP2002 English: Learning to be literate Assessment 2 as a sample activity.

References:

Gibson, R. & Ewing, R. (2011). Transforming the curriculum through the Arts. Palgrave Macmillan: Melbourne.

Week 10 Visual Arts 3

Visual Arts 3: Encouraging Art Dialogue

This week, we looked at the different approaches to taking to children about their art and encouraging art dialogue. Robert Schirrmacher in Art and Creative Development for Young Children (1998) has identified six of the most common approaches used by adults to respond to children’s art, and in class we discussed how some are not suitable:

1. Complimentary

2. Judgmental

3. Valuing

4. Questioning

5. Probing

6. Correcting (Ewing & Gibson, R., 2011, pp. 136-137)

We found that teachers should not use these approaches which had negative effects on students’thinking and creating processes. Instead of those useless approaches, there were more questions and comments should be provided by teachers focused on:

The elements of design (Ewing & Gibson, R., pp.138-139):

l Line

l Shape

l Size

l Value

l Texture

l Colour

The principles of design (Ewing & Gibson, R., pp.139-140):

l Repetition

l Balance

l Rhythm

l Harmony

l Contrast

l Gradation

l Movement

l Emphasis

l Proportion

l Unity

Then for each group, Robyn provided us a piece of children’s paintings. As preserved teachers, we were required to ask students some appropriate questions based on the elements and principles of design, such as “How did you use different colours to make the patterns?” and “How did you use the colour you did in your painting to form unity?” These questions would engage students to think deeper about their artworks and the knowledge they have used unconsciously in the process of creating.

In the next section we participated in a painting activity and the uses of colours. Like what we did in last semester, but this time instead of dividing a piece of paper into 4 sections and only using a pair of complimentary colours, we painted monochromic, neutral, warm or cold and complimentary colours in the four sections. This activity was the one I engaged the most in this semester since Visual Arts is concerned with ‘creative manifestations of the human imagination’ (Lynn, 2002, p.7; Ewing & Gibson, R., 2011, p.130). While creating and expressing students’ own ideas in paintings, it was also a process of comprehension the elements and principles of design. My work can be view
below.

References:

Gibson, R. & Ewing, R. (2011). Transforming the curriculum through the Arts. Palgrave Macmillan: Melbourne.

Week 9 Visual Arts 2

Visual Arts 2: Child-based & Teacher-based

In this tutorial we learnt that assessment is “an ongoing process of gathering evidence of and making judgements about students’ needs, strengths and achievements. Assessment should not rely solely on quality of finished product, but pay particular attention at processes that combine to create that product” (Gibson, R., Art Tutorial 2). The attitudes and skills are important to the learning process and should be a focus of attention. That means teachers should not judge or measure students’ artwork in terms of right or wrong. This knowledge is very important and as preserved teachers, we should keep this idea in mind when we begin teaching in school and have assessments of children’s work. In my personal experience, when I was in Year 4, my teacher judged my drawing as ‘wrong’ and ‘disappointing’ because it was different from other students’ work. This experience had a large impact on my life and was one major reason made me did not want to continue further Art learning for the rest of my life. However now, this personal experience now become a power reminding me to be cautious in the way to approach assessment and encourage students enjoying the process of learning not focusing too much on the final results.

Psychological theories, much in vogue during the fifties and sixties, gave rise to arguments which made art, as a manifestation of the unconscious mind, a necessary process in achieving a balanced personality or in a more mechanistic sense an adjunct to the development of cognition (Messon, P., 1985; Heyforn, V.M., 1985, p.55). “Treasure boxes” as one way to process assessment, encourages students to decorate their own boxes, keep students’ artworks in their boxes. The idea is engaging students’ imagination of their private treasure boxes and hence, students would treat their artworks as pieces of treasure. I would like to do this activity in my future teaching since “treasure boxes” does not only fit a primary school setting, it also help students cherishing to their own work and Arts. Students could also display their treasure boxes to their parents so that parents could know what their children had gained from schools.

Then in the next session of the tutorial, we focused on wheels we had started working from last week. Ms. Gibson handed us a viewfinder, and let us select a section of our wheels drawing. Then we enlarge that section in a large piece of paper. Students used various techniques to do artworks with limited resources, such as scrunching paper, cutting paper into different shapes and sticking them into different parts of the drawing. This activity encouraged students in using their creativity and imagination and using limited resources to create pieces of artworks.

This is a picture of half-finished product.

Reference:

Heyforn, V.M. (1985). The Artistic Creativity in The Aesthetic in Education, Malcolm Ross (Ed.)Pergamon