This week involved a completely practical dance workshop and a drama workshop which blended some practical elements with theory and discussion.

Dance mainly involved practising with the moves we devised in groups the week before to create a dance, with some other activities worked in. The activity I felt was particularly helpful (as someone who is categorically not a dancer), was one in which the teacher would have the class in a circle, and ask for a suggestion of a move for the numbers 0-9, which ties into the ideas put forward by Cone (2009), who states that dance should to an extent, be child-led.

We would then end up with 10 different moves, all of which had been devised by the children in the class – which I believe could also be beneficial in terms of allowing your class to take ownership of any work they do in dance, by having it all be their own work and not prescribed by the teacher. From there, we broke into our groups to create a dance using those moves, but we were to choose someone’s mobile number. What this allowed us to do was have the whole class using the same moves, but presenting variation in the order and use of those steps in the different groups’ dances.

I think this would be a beneficial way to approach dance with a primary class, as it teaches co-operation, memory skills and encourages creativity in addition to other aspects more commonly associated with physical education.

Drama

In drama, we were encouraged to consider the fluidity of drama when teaching it. This stems from the idea that while you may go into a lesson with a plan in place and an understanding of the nature of the stimuli you present, the children in your class and their response to those stimuli has the potential to be remarkably varied depending in the level you teach. It is important then, to ensure that you try not to allow too much deviation, particularly during the phase of ITE. Once qualified and more well acquainted with your class and what to expect when teaching drama, you could allow for a little more deviation.

It was also stressed to us that while an element of drama teaching will come from books, especially in younger primary levels, it should not be relied on as the only medium to interpret through drama. Neelands (2000) said that “Literacy…….is language in action. It makes things happen, it is a means of transforming your world, it is the essential that joins cause and effect in human affairs.” [unable to find reference – on slides]

In our digitally literate age, many of the texts we engage with do not necessarily fit the standard definition of text as words on paper, but rather fall into other categories. For example, we frequently engage with film and television, which can be considered themselves as derivatives of drama and theatre traditions. Theatre has its own rules, through visual expression, sound, and staging conventions which form the tools that drama can use to put forward its own narrative. While we don’t start out teaching children all of these conventions, drama is its own way of approaching literacy and literary concepts (Baldwin and Fleming, 2003), and in teaching drama we should be equipping children with the necessary tools to successfully engage with drama, whether in a performative role or as a spectator.

We discussed some of the conventions we could use in teaching drama:

• Vox Pop
• Role on the Wall
• Thought tracking
• Voice in Head
• Mime

These are quite general conventions and can be applied in a wide range of subject areas within drama. They do not rely on a scene’s content to be relevant, but rather can be used regardless of the initial subject as a storytelling tool.

For middle to upper primary, I personally like the idea of improvisation techniques and approached to drama. You could turn a drama lesson into IDL very easily, for example if reading a class novel, use that as the stimulus for a piece of improvisation. As children move past the initial shy, giggly stage of learning through drama, they will realise that it is a serious medium in its own right, and take it seriously. Going back a few weeks, I had initially thought about tieing learning through drama in class to a wider school approach, enabling children to see that drama is one part of a wider industry or field, for example, incorporating technical roles such as lighting and sound, and how those are used to great effect in a piece of work. Approaching drama as a wider subject in this way could also allow children who are not entirely comfortable performing find an area of drama that appeals to them, while still enabling them to benefit and learn the conventions of drama and theatre in a way that ensures drama remains an accessible aspect of the curriculum.

 

References

Baldwin, P. and Fleming, K. (2003) Teaching Literacy Through Drama. London: Routledge.

Cone, T. (2009) Following Their Lead: Supporting Children’s Ideas for Creating Dances, Journal of Dance Education, 9:3, 81-89, DOI: 10.1080/15290824.2009.10387390