Nick’s all things uni drama blog

So the first week back from teaching rounds and time to recap some serious drama for learning across the curriculum. After 6 long weeks of not be able to (or not knowing how to) find the drama for learning across the curriculum folder on DSO but now i have found it and read the assessment I’m unsure if I should continue using the integration approach I used in week 2 discussing what happened and then answering the questions in one, I guess I’ll just see how I go.

We began Monday’s workshop with a bit of a debriefing of how the teaching rounds went for those who had them and it seemed everyone had reasonably good things to say. The other’s who remained at uni were going to tell us how they went each week out at sa school but we ran out of time and didn’t get to find out so i guess this will be when we return after break. So after this we were asked to move the chairs and stuff back grab a piece of paper and draw a bully (still having trouble uploading pictures will be chasing it up over the break) in which we all came back together and looked at each and discussed the features we saw. The idea of this exercise is to understand if students had a stereotypical impression of bullies, if this was the case a discussion could be had to describe how some other bullies look. My bully had sharp teeth, a menacing roar and Jo commented that it appeared that maybe the bullies bark is worse then their bite.

The next exercise we undertook involved the group standing in the circle and saying something that a bully would say with the option of a gesture as well. I found this strikingly familiar because a group of year ten’s i taught worked on some stuff about cyber bullying and the year 11s were working on developing material for the school show ‘out of sync’ which is sort of about bullying but not really. The thing that people said in the group was stuff that these students also said during workshops. It shows that bullying does carry with it some really strong stereotypes. Anyway this activity allows students to share things they may have been bullied with but also to possibly help them identify what bullying sounds like so they can maybe step in another time.

The third exercise we undertook involved getting in partners and making a single tableau image of some physical bullying. Most of the images were physically bullying through indirect means such as standing over, glaring etc. My partner and I decided to the very physical contact with one on the ground and the other laying the boot in. We did receive a comment about boys being really physical but I reckon if this workshop was run with student’s year eight or below they would more generally show the real physical bullying through contact. This much like the previous exercise can let students see what forms physical bullying can take and if no indirect physical bullying was not shown this could be another step in the process to show what physical bullying can look like in all forms.

We formed up into groups of three after this and had to make a short scene about either extortion or exclusion and I’m pretty sure it worked out that there were 4 groups two doing each of them. Some really good scenes came out of this; I’m just struggling to remember what they were right now. My groups were about a boy and a girl who extorted money of a girl because we were going to make up lies about her so that the boy she liked would hate her. Anyways probably not that important more to the point this exercise that allows students to grasp the idea that bullying can go much further then verbal or physical when people manipulate and exclude to get what they want, being a much more indirect from of bullying.

We then made small role plays about an incident which happened to a bully in there life which had turned them into a bully. My group went with the eBay wielding junky mother who sold everything the father gave to the child to buy drugs. It was a little bit confusing but when the story came out i think everyone got the picture, we also saw a girl who thought she was better then she was and therefore bullied those around her to make herself feel better and parents neglecting the child. This exercise allows the students to feel empathy for the bully and see that bullies are not always bad people doing it for pleasure they are probably even more messed up then their victims in certain cases. It also allows anyone in the class who is a victim of bullying to feel slightly empowered to see a bully (what’s the opposite of empower??) powerless, that my guess anyway.

We had a discussion about the types of people victims of bullying can turn to discuss the problems they are encountering. Our group spoke about a couple of systems such as buddying, restorative justice, student assistant systems. All of these were good but they defiantly al contain flaws. We then got into pairs and started improvising a discussion between a victim of bullying and someone they have turned to. In mine i was talking to two older sisters about being payed out at school and there was a variety of different ideas that came out of this. This exercise I guess lets student experiment with how they could approach a third party about their bullying problem and the kind of things they could say which would be an extremely helpful stepping stone for a student who needs to take that step.

So the group briefly spoke about the bullies in fairy tales and the exercise which could be done to recreate a scene from one of said fairy tales but to make the bullying character out of control crazy bully of the century which is a more light hearted way of looking at bullies. WE brushed over this very quickly and then moved onto creating a bully rap about the stuff that was covered in the class. The group I as in we were shocking but the other group really pulled something together and it sounded really great. This is a nice alternate way to perform information about bullying. Jo also said to check out on YouTube a video about bullying which I just punched some stuff in and watched a few which were hilarious to say the least.
http://www.youtube.com

That was the first half of the session or 2/3rds of the session which was all taken from a workshop designed for grades 3-6 which could be used as a stand alone workshop or the stimulus for play building about bullying. I will be uploading it once i figure out how to do that.

So anyway it’s been about a week since I was writing this first section because Easter weekend got real deep but here to finish it off now. So anyway we had come back from break and we started looking at a unit of work called ‘Defining Moments’ which is a seven session look at bullying and dramatic skills. You can find it on the mind matters website or here is a link (I think) http://cms.curriculum.edu.au/mindmatters/resources/resources.htm

Anyway we ran the first session really quickly skipping over things a bit more quickly due to the time we had in class. We started the session with a warm up walking around the space and taking on the characterisation of toughs, timid and stars. As we walked around the space we would then engage in a little conversation as that archetype. We discussed about the physicalisation of each of the archetypes about how they held themselves (gait), walked, gestures, talked and others. Jo then related this to status work and the dramatic skills that could also be discussed. After this we separated into two group and had to make a snap shot, one group was ‘movie star hits town’ and ‘louts hang out on Local Street’. I didn’t realise it was a frozen image and started acting during my groups then to realise it was meant to be frozen, ahahah. These images also brought up discussion about dramatic skills because using the snap shot you can discuss the use of space, focus and gesture and how successful it is at developing the visual image.

The next exercise we got into pairs and played a little improvisation game in which one person was a bully and the other the victim. The first impro began with the bully standing and the victim sitting, a frozen image was then brought to life with the bully saying you know what i want now give it to me; this began the impro. We looked breifely at on of the pairs and then move onto the second impro started with a frozen image of bully in the seat and the victim standing, the impro began with the victim saying excuse me that is my chair and then continued on. We again looked at one of the pairs but if we had time we could have looked at more of them. This exercise opens a whole heap of food for discussion because there is immediately the personification of the bully and victim, how did each of them use their body, voice, language and positioning. The change in power of the bully from standing to sitting is another great thing to be discussed because how did the bully alter his/her body, movement to compensate not having the dominant power of standing.

We ran out of time and so didn’t get a chance to have ago at the third scenario which is the human guinea pig, where one member of a group is sent away when they come back the group treats them in a particular way, ignored, blamed, welcomed and then treated like a movie star. This session is one out of seven and is more sophisticated then the one we ran through in the first half of the class aimed more towards secondary students. I have ran this lesson before with two different year eight groups and they both responded extremely well to it, especially the human guinea pig exercise. They absolutely loved that and it generated so much discussion about what it was like. I tweaked the exercise though so that each group had four members and each member got a chance to be the guinea pig which i don’t think altered the outcomes because the students spoke easily about how their experience was different to each other. I am defiantly keen to try this unit of work out at some stage in the future because it addresses bullying and works specifically on dramatic skills and getting students to identify how and when these skills are used.

I had a look at the responsibility website and started looking for resources related to social awareness and transformation but I haven’t found much except for papers.

Ok so I think I’ll try a different approach to last week’s posts, trying to combine the session outline with the questions.

We began the class today by drawing a self portrait of ourselves because the class was really about self reflection especially in relation to teaching and learning and how this self reflecting can help us be better teachers. We then began looking at a picture story book Luke’s Way of Looking, we started by reading the first page of the book and discussing what we saw in the picture and how it was drawn. The picture lacked colour except for a shade of yellow and the picture was drawn with cross hatching. Continuing reading the book it was about a boy who during art class drew and painted things differently and his teacher was turbo angry about it, Luke never spoke back to the teacher when he got angry. After reaching this point in the story we were told that even though Luke didn’t respond in class he kept a journal and we were to write what Luke wrote in his journal that night after Mr (I forget his name) yelled at Luke for painting a blue apple. I have to scan that in but it will be here sometime today I’m hoping. Anyway after writing Luke’s journal we read some aloud and continued the story, the story continued as it had but this time when Luke painted what was outside and it wasn’t what the teacher wanted he tore up his picture and broke his brushes. After reaching this point we performed some short impro’s scenes that showed what had happened to the teacher to turn him into the rigid draconian mean teacher he was. We then under took some duo impro’s about various things, between the teacher and another member of staff, the teacher and the principle and the principle and Luke. These impro’s showed a heap of possibilities about what could have happened in the story which is not told. After these performances we finished reading the book, Luke went to a museum and found a place that looked just like he saw and then returned to school and painted a picture so ‘wow’ not even the teacher had anything to say about it.

We looked at this book in relation to Multiple Intelligences and Preferred Learning styles because it showed that students see things in different ways and this impacts how they learn. The teacher in this story only taught in one way and wanted everything the students completed presented in one way. Teachers need to reflect on their own and their students intelligences and preferred learning styles so not alienate students and to give them the best opportunities to learn. Thinking about my own multiple intelligences, on the test we got my first intelligence from people (11), logic/maths (10), body (8), space (8), word (8), music (6) and self (5). On the left/right brain test i scored the middle brain with a 12. I think it is important to know this as a teacher because a teacher will naturally prefer to work and teach in their preferred ways but as a teacher we need to be diverse so not to limit our student’s ability to learn. Understanding our own intelligences and learning styles helps us to reflect on our teaching practices to see how we teach and then alter the ways we teach so to make sure all our students have the same opportunities.

The second half of the class we looked at different ways of teaching within the domain of science and the environment. The first thing we did was look at was the changing of state between matter; so as in from solid to plasma. We did this firstly by starting at a level of water moving through the space at a reasonable pace and then changed to a solid slowing the pace right down moving into the centre of the room until a stop. After that we began to change again moving faster and faster until all areas of the room high and low were covered that of a gas. This would be a way of showing students how matter alters through the states of liquid to solid back to liquid and then gas. After this we did a task that would test how well students understood the change of states in matter. We had to create three different scenes one of an ice block in the freezer, one of an ice block on a window sill and the last an ice block in an frying pan. I really liked this idea because science is never taught in this way, it is generally just words and maybe some diagrams. We then set about in our groups discussing what other science principles could be taught through drama, Jo suggested the solar system to us and we thought that it could be done mapping out each planets rotations like a dance with music on an oval or something and the music could be used to depict the passage of time. The other ideas that came out were acting out body systems and their functions and other I forget. In these cases the intelligences being used were mainly body and to a certain degree space, the preferred learning style would have been kinaesthetic and it would have been a more right brain activity. Was just searching for the drama science week that Jo was talking about on the net but I couldn’t find anything, oh well.

After looking at teaching science through drama when then focused on the environment, we started by thinking about all types of endangered species, we jumped into groups and selected one endangered animal and showed a series of stills reflecting why the animals had become endangered. After this we got back together and Jo said that this could be accompanied with research but led us onto another task which was to make a short scene showing how in some amount of time that animal would be saved from extinction. My group’s scene involved something ridiculous about China economic problems and hippies with lots of money but if we would have had research to back us up and a bit more time I’m sure our response would have been more plausible. I think if this was run in a classroom there would need to be research involved or the students could just as easily fall into creating a magic solution and no real worth while learning would take place.

Drama is defiantly more right brain then left because it is much more creative and uses a more tactile and kinaesthetic approach to learning, this is defiantly a good thing considering that a great deal of the curriculum tends to focus on left brain style of learning. I think that teaches should defiantly use the entire range of learning styles no matter what they are teaching because this gives each student the best opportunity to learn not only in their preferred learning style but in styles they may not necessarily prefer preparing them for all sorts of experiences through out their life. The reading really highlighted this point showing that the kinaesthetic and tactile learning styles that are often left out of subjects like science and maths, but they really shouldn’t be because there is so much opportunity to use them throughout any area of the curriculum. Drama is one subject in which I would defiantly say that kinaesthetic and tactile learning styles are used more and probably preferred to be used. Because of this Drama really develops the bodily intelligence (as in from Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences) because there is so much learning through movement and use of the body. I would defiantly argue that Drama also develops Interpersonal intelligence due to the need to work in groups and with a whole host of people, space and visual intelligence because of all the work undertaken with space and being aware of the space you’re in. I would also argue to some point that Drama develops Word intelligence because of the work with text, self intelligence because of the reflection that can often take place through the use of drama and music if looking at musical theatre. I really think that drama is a great tool for learning through the kinaesthetic and tactile learning styles as well as being so diverse as to help develop a whole range of a person’s multiple intelligences.
I reckon that’s about it for now so I guess next time I’ll be posting is in about 3 weeks.

Ok, well so damn behind on this stuff lousy smarch weather. So here I go:

In answer to the first question the main difference between the lesson’s run by Chris and Derek was the way the teacher’s went about trying to achieve their learning goals. On one hand Chris very successfully achieved her goal of getting the students engaged in the morale dilemma they faced between possibly poisoning people, possibly loosing their bonus maybe even their jobs and the fact they may be putting someone out of business. Derek on the other hand didn’t achieve this at all because the students arrived at a magic solution to the problem which meant they were never engaged in the meta-cognitive learning as desired. The reason for this I would argue is because of the roles each teacher played with their involvement in the dramatic play. Chris unlike Derek was involved in the dramatic play and therefore had the opportunity to direct the students as she desired towards her anticipated learning goals, where as Derek was merely an outsider who could not effect the action meaning when the students came up with the magic solution he could really do nothing to curb it and direct it the way he wanted. AS far as the knowledge and skills based learning i think Derek’s lesson was significantly deficient compared to Chris’s as well because the children at the town meeting would not have to use the same skills of participation, compromise and engagement to solve the morale problem they faced; their magic solution would not have required much of this to take place. Chris’ lesson made the children think, act and deal with the situation in a way that reflects the way things are done in life and was therefore a more valuable learning experience for those students.

So to answer question two the areas of development that the class touched on were cognitive, knowledge and skill based. It seems that the cognitive development was the learning focus of the lesson and was seen through the morale problem solving the students had to undertake to come to a feasible non-magical solution. The skills-based development came in many forms because the students had to engage in group work, listen, comprehend and ask appropriate questions, engage in discussion, recall information and finally use their imagination. Out of these areas the lesson was mainly focused on the students working together as small groups and one whole group and within those engaging in discussion; the others seem more incidental. The knowledge based development that would have taken place when the students were playing as scientists, imagining how scientists work and in what ways. The other knowledge based development would have to do with pollution aspect of the task because to make fertilizers their must be chemicals and chemicals can and do pollute the plant. I think both of these were areas of focus because the unit of work had to do with environmental science.

The reading talks about four types of play, functional, constructive, games with rules, dramatic and socio-dramatic play.

Functional play lets children explore their sensory-motor capabilities, repeating actions so they can repeat them at a later date, this type of play helps children learn about their physical capabilities and their effect on the environment.

Constructive play again using their sensory motor skills but the child adds a plan to their play, organising materials and what ever they need to undertake this plan; usually the child creates something that can often be left behind.

Games with rules consist of both physical games and table games in which children must agree on the proscribed set of rules which control the outcome of the game.

Dramatic and Socio-dramatic play is when children begin to consciously act out social interaction and by doing so experience human relationships by means of symbolic representation.

I touched briefly on this discussion in my last post about the class but reading these has made me think of more things to say. Firstly within our group our discussion seemed to centre on dramatic and socio-dramatic play when we would play things like war, fishermen or bus drivers. I realise now about the whole range of play that i undertook as a child assumingly starting with functional play as a baby and moving into the others with age. I talked about in my last post about thinking that as i got older i thought my play became more sophisticated with rules and limitations which really was just games consisting of rules and functional, constructive and/or dramatic play. An example of this was when my brother, cousins and I used to play games using Lego, dice and money, which involved constructive, socio-dramatic play and was a game with rules. The constructive play was involved with building vehicles out of Lego for a purpose where as the socio-dramatic play had to deal with spending money suitable to be successful within the rules of the game. My brother and I also used to sword fight using sticks or whatever a lot which I guess is functional and socio-dramatic play but as we got older we established rules and protocol to the play making it more like some sort of fencing match. So I guess I’m trying to say is that growing up my play may have involved on specific type of play but more likely it involved at least a number of them and as I aged all play moved into the sphere of games with rules. I think now about how much we do as children and that still takes place and i can see that often it correlates to some sort of play and learning through play. All though we would probably like to think that we do not play as adults, you can be sure that we certainly do.

One thing i have been pondering is the difference between male and female play and as we discussed in the whole group boys have a tendency towards more violent play. This is often discouraged as not political correct and is due to the socialisation of children. It just makes me wonder how much is built into us like a kitten learning to stalk prey through play and how much is socialisation. I really brought back from this discussion though that play allows children to explore their world in a consequence free way and is how children have learnt life skills since the human race became hunter/gathers and maybe before.

Ok I’ll get this post out of the way I don’t know what it is but I start bogging and my post turn into thesis. Anyway the elements for successful group work in drama I would contend are participation because if no one is involved how can anything get done. Collaboration because the best works comes when all are involved and working together as a team. Engagement because if the students are not engaged with the task they will struggle to get anything activities done. Respect for others opinions which are similar to collaboration but a bit deeper because the students need listen to each and compromise when it comes to decisions if this can’t be done there won’t even be a group to complete any task. Finally I would say willingness to have a go because talk is great but action is far better. I have referred to students here but really this list contains elements for successful work in any drama group or any group for that matter.

Ok so that’s week one out of the way, I better get started on week 2. But before I do I should just say that the information taken from said reading is Kitson, N., & Spiby, I. (1997). Drama 7-11: Developing Primary Teaching Skills. London: Routledge.

I haven’t yet bought the reader so I can’t answer the questions until I get one so I guess I’ll will just give a rundown of what we did and some of my feelings and reflections. I also still can’t log into DSO and download the unit guide so this one will be my best guess of what I should be writing.

Our class started as most week 1 classes normally do with the whole who are we all and what are we going to be doing in this unit. After that Jo briefly about Peter Slade and his book ‘Child Play’ saying that children learn a lot about the world through their play as children. We then were asked to split into smaller groups and talk about the type of play we used to engage in as a child. My group (Zoe and Darcy, I think) all believed that we stopped engaging in play of one form or another at quite a late age somewhere in year 7. Between us we had a multitude of imaginative scenario’s we would play, my experiences tended to be around war, fighting or dangerous scenario’s. This was similar to the other males experience in the group. One thing that I have been thinking about since the class was that my play became more sophisticated as I grew up. From a young age engaging in free play to an older age where the free play was more restrictive following rules more like a game. After this discussion we came together as a whole group to discuss what we had spoken about during this discussion Jo talked about observing a 7 year old engaging in play with a Barbie holding a conversation between two dolls, when she was seen acting in this way by an adult she became self conscious and internalised the dialogue she was previously having externally. Jo said that at about age 7 Slade said children underwent the dawning of seriousness (at least I think it was called that) where they would become aware that it was no longer appropriate to act like they had with play. I’m unsure about this guesstimate age because I defiantly remember playing in that way around adults until i was maybe 10 or something like that but there was defiantly a point when it did become inappropriate to play in this manner. But as with everything in education no child is the same and they will go through stages of development at different rates so this is probably to be expected considering it is more of a guide line.

This discussion led to Jo talking about the educational opportunities available to teacher’s who create a drama about something in their classroom. The example Jo spoke about was a Cafe which allowed for some great learning opportunities such as hygienic food prep, healthy diet, remembering orders, handling money and staff customer relationships. From here we broke up into smaller groups again to plan our own imaginative play area. My group (I have forgotten their names) decided to do a Zoo, initially thinking we could have students participating in the drama as animals we decided against it because we thought the opportunities for learning would be better suited if they did not. Jo suggested that the animals could be represented by posters that the students could research and find pictures of. The animals out of the way we went into a multitude of key roles zoo keepers, food vendors, patrons, zoologist, zoo manager, vets and others. WE then worked on developing some potential dramas/stories and came up with a few, the zoo was running at a loss, a new animal was being brought to the zoo, an animal birth, an infectious disease break out. We ran out of time and dint really get an opportunity to look at the opportunities for learning and other categories but the diagram and layout for designing an imaginative play area was great, I will try and scan it and put it on here when i figure some more stuff out.

So we had a short break and got into creating our own imaginative play area, FertieFree a fertilizer company that makes organic fertiliser’s pesticide and herbicide free. The lesson was taken from ‘Learning through Drama’ which I will be discussing in another post. So as a group we thought about the type of people that might work for FertieFree and then decided of taking on one of those roles and began to play out workers at FertieFree (no discussion straight in). Actually that was after making some still images of positions that our decided worker from FertieFree was taking. After working for a bit a meeting was called and we were told by the head researcher (I think) that because FertieFree was doing so well we were receiving a stock option bonus and that there was a crack in one of the outlet pipes that was not a problem. Not too many people were that excited (Morale was low) so we went back to work. After this we were brought together as a group and introduced to a mussel farmer who lived near the factor, she told her story about mussel farming being a family business for generations and encountering hardships in the 80s due to pollution but overcoming it and now doing quite well for themselves. After meeting the mussel farmer we went back to work and here another meeting was called to say that pollution has been detected by some coastal watch dog and that the maybe FertieFree was to be blamed, this caused much discussion with the blame being thrown around a bit especially at me by someone. This is where we discovered that we had no official ‘Boss’ or top dog to take the fall for what had been done, we also discussed the possibilities of what could be done and the consequences of following these actions such as lay offs, destruction of the coast, a.k.a morale dilemma bogey. At this point the mussel farmer was brought in because she had heard that their may be a leak from FertieFree and to discuss what we knew. This again was a problem because the lack of the ‘boss’ meant we could have no official answer, it also raised the question that the leak might be causing the mussel farmers mussels to be really good and boost their business but on the same hand was this going to end in tragedy with people getting ill and dying.

In the end we came up with no solution but for me the imaginative play brought these problems to the forefront of my thought and I began to question myself and what I believed to be the right course of action, which is what I think the task was designed to do. So I will have to hit up that article in another post but I believe the thing that I brought away from this class was that play allows children to experience things they would not normally be able to in a consequence free environment