Integrated Arts in Education Week 6

During today’s lecture, we looked into to the Creativity across Scotland document. This document explains what creativity is and how it can be improved. Creativity can be described as ideas that are important to an individual. This places a clear emphasis on how important it is to allow young learners to explore creativity in the classroom and this can be done through expressive arts.

During our visual arts workshop, we created our own prints. We created these using A3 paper and black ink. We used our fingers and hands to print onto the page with the blank ink and then drew what we thought the print represented onto the paper. This part of the lesson was very interesting as it gave us an insight into how to individualise visual arts and make it enjoyable for learners. In the second part of the workshop, we were given a second piece of paper and also a box with pieces of lego and toys. We had the opportunity to be creative and design our own art on the page using the toys and the black ink. An experience and outcome that relates to this activity is as follows:

In our drama workshop, we started off by discussing the anxiety and worry behind teaching drama. Many of my cohort, as well as myself, stated that they lacked confidence in the subject of drama and would not feel comfortable teaching it in schools. As drama is not a particularly structured subject, individuals feel that it may not work out how they pictured or planned. This can cause worry and stress and is one of the many reasons why drama is not implemented as much as it should be in the curriculum. We then moved on to discuss what drama is defined as. Some of the suggestions that myself and my group came up with was; pretending to be someone else and it can allow individuals to feel and relate to others in different situations or circumstances to themselves. Allow drama is not a part of everyday life as such, children are involved in playing games which include drama and this can be helpful when teaching drama to children by relating it to their everyday lives. Drama can also be taught in a specific way which allows certain issues to be highlighted, for example, racism and bullying. Following on from this, we looked at a painting “Windows of the West”. It describes a tenement building in the West End of Glasgow. In our groups, we had to act out a scene to describe what we imagined the life of some of the people living in the building would be and present it to the rest of the cohort. While acting out our scenes, we were asked to incorporate six conventions of drama which included; flashback, flashforward, thought tracking, improvisation, still image and role play. These conventions should be incorporated into all performances in drama and are a good starting point for teaching drama to young learners. An experience and outcome that relates to this activity is as follows: