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.