Drama

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.

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.








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.