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.