This week focused on drama and music in education.

In drama, we were again put into the role of learners, in a Halloween themed drama lesson. We were shown an image of a derelict house, and ran activities using a number of drama conventions: hot seating, slow motion, flashback/forward, forum theatre and narration, in addition to teacher in role. The activities centred around a house in which an “incident” took place several years ago, and in our groups we used the various conventions to explore what that incident could have been.

In Beginning Drama 4-11, Joe Winston and Miles Tandy talk about the different learning outcomes and the aims of teaching drama to children, and have condensed them down to four main points:

• Creating, adapting and sustaining different roles, individually/for group work
• Conveying story, themes, emotions and ideas in their own work through characters, actions and narrative
• Use drama conventions to explore characters and ideas
• Evaluating their own performance and that of others in contributing to an effective performance.

The activities we undertook in the drama workshop would certainly go a good way towards reaching these aims, particularly if carried out in the way they were in the workshop. In those activities we were asked to improvise/devise short pieces which explored different aspects of the same house’s history, which often required maintaining the same character, and thinking creatively about what happened and why, even if it was not necessarily mentioned in the piece explicitly. Doing this with pupils may, in fact, lead to a beginning understanding of subtext and the use of backstory, even if it is not expressly used in their pieces.

These kinds of activities can also tie into literacy activities in the classroom. Children could use their own pieces of writing to create drama using the aforementioned conventions, and in turn, the use of conventions can inspire work in literacy. Drama is after all, another method of storytelling, and can work hand-in-hand with written work and reading. Personally, while I would perhaps use books as stimuli with younger children, I believe that with older children, it would be preferable to allow the children an opportunity to explore their own creativity and ideas, which would also tie into the CfE aims for personalisation and choice, although within parameters set by the teacher.

In music, we looked at singing specifically. We ran through some warm up exercises and explored the teacher’s use of their voice as their main teaching tool, and how to look after it. The rest of the session was then spent exploring a few different resources for teaching singing, as it was acknowledged that often teachers are not comfortable teaching singing themselves. This was particularly useful for me as I hope to give children a wide variety of musical experiences, but I do feel limited by my own ability at times, particularly in singing. Having a range of resources to hand, particularly if they are topic based is a huge benefit to teachers such as myself who do feel a little uncomfortable teaching the subject. The resources used in the class were a lot of fun too, with an extremely likeable presenter whom I feel children would take to really well. To me, that is a crucial part of arts education as well, that it is presented as fun and non-academic as much as possible to enable children to engage as fully as possible.

 

References

Winston, J. and Tandy, M. (2005). Beginning drama 4-11. London: David Fulton.