Nick’s all things uni drama blog

I asked two teachers seperatly to discuss whether they believed that the devleoped section of my portfolio adequatly displayed the 7th VIT attribute ‘Graduating teachers reflect on, evaluate and improve their professional practice’. The first i discussed it with was Robyn a first year out primary teacher. Robyn saw my second draft and since discussing it with her i further changed my lay out again. In the first draft i tried to display a lesson plan with teachers and students comments alongside with some annotation to show where the attribute was being displayed. I struggled immensly with this format and decided to scrap the idea and start over. The second draft i decided to pick out speciffic areas of the VIT attribute and use teachers, students and others comments to show that i was working towards best practice of the attribute. This is the version that I showed to Robyn, Robyn said i had the right idea but due to the fact that i was trying to rpesent it on A4 sized paper it made everything to cluttered and the information hard to decipher. She said adapting the idea to be in an A3 format with the attribute in the middle and all the information surrounding that would make it less cluttered and easier to understand. She also commented that formating it in a style that went through each A3 sheet would add consistancy and further make it easier to follow. So I took Robyn’s advice and rearanged everything so that the specific area of each attribute was centered on an A3 sheet with some of my own comments written in Italics under it describing how i was working towards best practice. Around this i stuck all the comments that illustarted the points i had made in italics. I was much happier with this lay out because it definatly looked much clearer and consistant. I showed the third draft to Robyn and she said that it was definatly clear as to how and why i am working my way towards best practice. The second teacher i showed the portfolio piece was to a tertiary trade (mechanics) teacher of who teaches apprentices and secondary school VET students. His name is funnily enough also Robin. Robin had a little difficulty seeing how it all came together but after actually describing how it all worked he agreed that this piece definatly showed how I was workign towards best practice. He did comment though that high lighting certain sections would definatly make speciffic points stand out and draw peoples attention to staright away. So i guess this si what i’ll submit and see how it all goes.

On Monday we had the opportunity to go to Essex heights primary school and run the workshop we had devised in the previous classes with a group of grade three students. The workshop we developed had no changed from last week and was focused on inventions. The space we had been given to work in was not particularly very big but beggars can be choosers, so we just got in there and had a crack. I think overall the workshop went really well, the warm ups activities were received and played out really well. The first one which was getting into certain numbered of people groups and making an invention and sound was good to see how they made a washing machine or whatever and what sound they would put with it (if any). The second activity (machines) was good as well but the first group really didn’t get the idea of extending the machine by using other participant’s bodies, they also tended to have similar actions and sounds. After showing an example, the second group’s machine had more variation in their sounds and movement. Both these activities went really well and the students picked up quite easily how to they were played out.

We then started the main drama which lasted for the rest of the workshop, this involved firstly enrolling the students as experts and telling them that they were going to be playing as scientists engineers and all that jazz for the drama. The first step was for students to generate characters for themselves but this was scrapped as Jo felt it would distract and make the next process too difficult. So instead they went on a little journey to get the conference. During this journey one or maybe two students said that they weren’t really going anywhere. We discussed this after the workshop and Jo said that it was probably the student’s mechanism for showing to us that they weren’t stupid and knew that the drama was only imaginary and not just a students trying to disrupt or destroy the drama. They were brought into the conference room where the four ministers were; all of these as teacher in roles. I don’t know how successful the teacher in roles were because firstly I think that Susie broke the role when she started asking questions as bringing the relationship back from scientists/conference delegate to student/teacher because I thought that the idea of a teacher in role was to remove the previous relationship. I didn’t really have much to say because Zoe said a heap of the things that I was planning to say so I just tried to kept it brief and to the point but I’m pretty sure my message wasn’t really that clear. Anyway the student’s did take on the information and well enough to move onto the next task which I guess couldn’t really be called a failure.

So the student’s got cracking on their designs and they came up with so many good ideas, digging trams that repaired the damage after it was done, shrinking cars, teleporters, hover boat cars and flying trams and the best part i reckon was the way these vehicles were fuelled some examples were moon power, rain power and solar power. How they work I’m not sure but that wasn’t the idea of the exercise the exercise was to dream the impossible and they did that very well. After their short design period they were told of the impending science fair in which all their ideas had been picked for. They were then told they had to pick one idea and make either a model of diagram and explain to the rest of us how it worked. I was a bit disjointed that only one group choose to show (with their bodies a.k.a working model) because their presentation was fantastic. The other groups did well but I would have preferred if every group presented with a short drama/working model of their invention. I think with more time we could have got the students to do this but I guess (and I’m only guessing) that some of the students would have been extremely unwilling to perform. After they had all presented that left the conference building and we came together and talked about what we had done. This although was short lived because we had very little remaining time.

Overall the workshop was a success although if I had the chance to run it again i would want to add more drama because I felt the students could have presented something more dramatic rather then just talking over the top of each other. The workshop reminded me again of how careful as a teacher I must be not to assume student’s acquired skills or knowledge and this was especially the case walking into a grade three class which may have never done any drama in their entire schooling career. I also couldn’t help but think about Slade and Childs play and when he comments that Child can begin to perform for audiences and should not just be involved in play. The process overall I think was rewarding because it has shown me that planning for drama can be used on any topic and it just needs to be implemented to see if it works or doesn’t or what should be changed.

So on Monday we came together to further plan what we will be doing next Monday. Just to recap we are running a workshop on inventions for a class of grade 3’s at their school. Using the idea’s we had brainstormed we began to think about how we could present and impart some knowledge on these students. We started by thinking abut how we could start it, the first thing discussed was what type of experts the students could be in the drama. A big list was thought of inventors, technicians, engineers, designers, salesmen, consumers and more. I’m not really sure if we discussed the warm ups first or the suggestions for what was being invented and for what reasons was it needing to be invented. I think it was the warm ups. Jo detailed some games that involved students getting into groups and building inventions with their bodies so like cars, jets, washing machine etc. I also think machines were suggested at this point as well which is when the groups build a working machine with a sound and a noise to accompany.

When then attacked the problem of what invention we could go for and what was the reason for needing it. I believe inventing new toys came up first and Darcy threw in a suggestion for a good warm up game in a similar motif. It was called museums or something similar but we would change it to a toy shop. In the shop when closing a cleaner would be cleaning the shop but the toys were alive and had to try and touch the cleaner without her noticing. We decided this wouldn’t work that well with grade three’s because they wouldn’t grasp the idea of the acting as a specific toy within the context of the game that well. We discussed toys for a bit throwing ideas that the students were at a conference for the innovation of new toys. The idea didn’t really get far because it lacked a dramatic structure, so we moved on.

The next suggestion was robots which was ultimately not taken up for various reasons but got us more focused on the purpose of the invention and why it needed to be invented. A few suggestions were thrown out and the idea of transport was quickly taken up and expanded on easily so it was the theme we stuck with. The idea was that the student’s had been called together because they were the top of their field for engineering, design, inventing and the like to develop idea’s which may not be viable now but will be in the future for transportation, this following in the step of Leonardo Di Vinci and his design of a helicopter. Jess said something about a movie about a child inventor ‘meet the Robinsons’ I think and told us about a science fair in the movie. This got Jo onto the idea of that and soon enough those who had attended the meeting had been given a grant and they had to bring their machine to the fair and show how it worked. So we pretty much had the lay out of the lesson which was the warm ups - machines and the machine body building, students create their own role (name, occupation), conference with 4 teacher in roles (I’m playing the innovation and future guy), students to design a invention for transport that takes into account current situation of the world in groups, they are then to come back to the conference as their characters and discuss what they have designed, then they will all be awarded grants and have to attend a fair to showcase their ideas doing a little drama about it, finally we will discuss what they have learnt.

That was pretty much the lesson, except my home work is to come up with about 30 seconds of dialogue for my teacher in role which I’m still thinking about.

This post is about a week late, so I’ll see how I go with remembering everything that took place. We began the class with a discussion about the article Dramathink or how to take the source apart looking a the first model which was the mind map but we shortly shifted focus and Jo talked about how objects can be the starting and focus point for creating drama’s. The idea that came up was about convicts which I’m sure was related to the first model in the reading. We discussed what kind of objects we could use as focus items. Ideas were thrown about passports, official documents, items of clothing pictures and probably other things i can’t remember. The idea was that items such as these can be put into ‘our immigration basket’ and used in relation to immigration. Jo asked us if anyone had been to the immigration museum and the response was pretty much no all round. So she told us there was this red pleather suitcase at the museum that had someone name on it and a story. I don’t know about anyone else but at that point my brain clicked on and said of course suitcase/immigration that works. Anyway she proceeded to tell us the story of a Vietnamese immigrant who had left Vietnam during the war for Australia but she didn’t have anything except the clothes on her back and a wedding ring. She didn’t want to arrive to her new home wearing nothing so she ended up selling her wedding ring to buy a red pleather suitcase. Inside the suitcase she packed nothing but at least looked like she had things when she arrived. Later she gave the suitcase to the museum with her story.

We then spoke about how at the museum there is this section that is like a recreation of a boat from three different eras, them being the 1850s, 1950s and another one but i ant remember. There have been many immigrants in Australia’s history since European settlement. So if you were going to look at immigration a specific period would have to be looked at, we were going to look at the 1850s and Britain assisted immigrant period. Jo spoke about using warm-ups to get students thinking about a topic before they actually know they will be working on that. The warm up we undertook for immigrants had a name that I can’t recall. It involved students being ordered by a captain to do a list of different things and the last one to do it would be left out or not. The order were climb the crows-nest- which was like climbing a ladder on the spot, scrub the deck - wouldn’t believe it but acting like scrubbing the deck, the captain’s coming - salute the captain, pat the parrot - pat the parrot on the left shoulder and when calling either port, starboard or the other two directions for the boat - you must move to that assigned area. This exercise in relation to immigrants would get student’ thinking in terms of boats (especially for the 1850s) and the areas and names of a boat and also that the captain is the one in charge of a boat.

So after we enjoyed the warm up we sat back down and Jo pulled out of her basket some pictures of London from the 19th century, it was in fact a drawing by someone there at the time. So we all talked about what we could see in the picture and the main points were that it was crowded and dirty. Jo then took on a teacher in role of a woman who was leaving the one of the inns in the picture. We asked her a heap of questions and ended up finding out she was from up north near the border and came to the city because machines had put her husband out of work in the agricultural sector. Although he was finding it hard to get any work and the work she was doing was barely putting a roof over their head letting alone feeding them. We asked her if she had ever thought about leaving and in response she asked where would I go? Have you heard of Australia we asked? Yes she responded and she was giving this flyer which had details about immigrating to Australia on it; that is when we found out she couldn’t read. A great opportunity to impart some knowledge on the students because they may not have been aware that many people in the 19th century couldn’t read. Anyway after we told her what the leaflet said she went on her way but the exercise could have carried on for longer. The picture and teacher in role give a great opportunity for giving insight into the world of England in the 19th century and since there is personal interaction they may retain the information better.

We were now asked to take on roles as the woman and her husband debating over if we should go or not, this was short but again could be extended. The next exercise was a thought tunnel in which the class would be separated onto two sides and someone would walk through the tunnel. As the person walked past each person would give a reason for going or not (depending which side they were on and it was fine for things to be repeated) and at the end of the tunnel they would say that’s it I’m going or I’m not going depending on the reasons given. This exercise was really good for summarising reasons for or against anything really because it shows there are two sides to any story and in this case that immigration was a really tough choice because life was bad in England but in Australia life was unknown.

We skipped the next step which was to create roles for ourselves as students but in this section students can draw themselves and make up a name, occupation and reason for immigrating; reinforcing what they had been learning about immigration in the previous exercise and moderation may had to have been made for names or occupations which were too modern. Their characters would then be used in the next scenario. Another teacher in role was used but this time as the port official who had come to meet the people wanting to immigrate. The port official was pretty hard and mean type of character who endowed the students with a bit more of knowledge about how hard the journey was the only type of passenger they would take because diseased people would certainly make a mess. The one thing I really liked that Jo said was show me your teeth because teeth are a big indicator of health status.

So we pretty much just talked about the rest of the workshop which involved getting students to write letters home, using a captains log to make scenes about life on the ship, tableau’s of leaving the port in England, if these blanks could talk - a sound scape that captured what life on the ship sounded like and then when they finally arrived we looked at a picture of Melbourne and discussed the differences between their and London. Comparing these we discussed what had changed and the possibilities for dramas after this. The big thing here was that the artist had three aboriginals in the foreground of the picture and then we spoke about the impact of immigration on the flora, fauna and indigenous population. I did forget one little exercise we left out was standing in a circle arms around each other and swaying side to side with eyes closed and making ocean and boat sounds to give the feeling of actually being on the boat. That was good but Jo said it can and usually does get quite out of control.

The final thing we did before leaving was to discuss what we will be doing in a week at the primary school. I think I mentioned in an earlier post that the theme was inventions. Anyway we sat down and used Inventions as the middle of a mind map and began to talk about things that related to inventions adding to the map. The ideas that came up were quite vast from specific inventors to the impact of inventions. We kept the list to use this week for designing the lesson we will use next week.