In today’s session, we looked at drama within the current curriculum and how research shows that many primary teachers lack confidence and subject knowledge in terms of teaching drama to a class.
“Drama means different things for different people” (Kitson and Spiby, 1997)
We continued to discuss the previously stated story of The Lonely Dragon. In this session, we concentrated on the theme of being misunderstood. This is a good theme to incorporate into a drama lesson and link to a circle time to get the children to open up about their feelings and understand how others may be feeling in the class. We used several role-playing techniques, including freeze frame, a thought tunnel and teacher in role. A freeze frame is useful as it gets the children to think about how the character is feeling and thinking at that point.
The Teacher in Role focus allows the teacher to work with the children from inside the drama and enables them to structure the children’s contributions. Furthermore, this allows the teacher to challenge ideas through questioning within a story. The aim of Teacher in Role is to establish appropriate atmospheres, set particular language contexts and also to support appropriate understanding and empathy.
Below is a clip of Jonothan Neelands in role as Cordelia.
References
- 2016, D. F. (2014) Teacher in role [Online]. Available: http://dramaresource.com/teacher-in-role/ [Accessed 8 Jan 2017].
- Kitson, N. and Spiby, I. (1997) Drama 7-11: Developing primary teaching skills. New York: Routledge.
