Teaching Drama: Reflection

Dear Kelda, 

Reading your letter it sounds like you have great understanding of the powerful impact that using dramatic elements such as taking on a role, experiencing the tension and climax that drama can provide and understanding the importance of de-role. 

I love the idea of utilising drama strategies to unpack literary content with students. Two strategies that I could effortlessly assimilate into a teaching practice would be writing in role and freeze frames. As you have mentioned using a freeze frame of the story and having the students express the emotions, context and the thoughts of characters using only they’re bodies, gestures and expressions is a wonderful way in which students can utilise their understanding of complex sentiments. I think it is important for students to reflect on these so that as Gibbs (2010) encourages teachers, learning is ‘informed by thinking, feeling, knowledge, values and beliefs’ (p.25). 


Keeping the aesthetic education processes [AE] in mind [Making, Presenting, Responding] (Sinclair, 2012, p.47), we can see that even in only using a few dramatic strategies in our teaching we give students the opportunity to operate in the AE way for instance by making a tableau or freeze frame and here students will also present this freeze frame to themselves and each other, and respond to it when reflecting.

While this type of drama in the classroom is exciting and relatively simple to explicate the extent of my own teaching with drama in classes has been limited to dramatic readings and asking students to identify characters thinking and feeling so the idea of bringing drama comprehensively into literacy is a wonderfully dynamic way to bring life into literacy.

I was quite titillated by the Drama for learning and creativity initiative [D4LC] and am curious about its uptake in Australia. I did find founder Patrice Baldwin’s page and it mentions Australia but the UNESCO, (n.d) paper on D4LC doesn't. One other thing to add to my findings is the idea of Augusto Boal’s process drama and it being somewhat equal to children’s play (Bird et al. 2012, p.68). Specifically that I can use Augusto Boal's unscripted style of play in the context of the story, having everyone being involved and maximising that potential for learning using process drama.

Regards, 

Tracey




References:

Baldwin, P. (n.d). Drama for Learning and Creativity (D4LC). United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Retrieved from http://www.unesco.org/culture/en/artseducation/pdf/fullpaper301patricebaldwin.pdf 


Bird, J., Donelan, K., Freebody, K., O'Tool, J., and Sinclair, C. (2012). Drama: Social Dreaming in the 21st Century. In Sinclair et al. (Ed.). Education in the Arts. (p.68). South Melbourne: Oxford University Press.

Gibbs, C. (2012). The Reflective Practitioner. in Gibbs, C. To be a teacher: Journeys toward authenticity (pp. 25-45). Sydney, NSW: Pearson.

Sinclair, C. (2012). Teaching for the Aesthetic, Teaching as Aesthetic. In Sinclair et al. (ed). Education in the Arts. (pp. 43-53). South Melbourne: Oxford University Press.