(This blog post will combine week 11 and 12)
In week 11, we had our final drama input where groups in our class continued micro-teaching. We also had another dance session where we planned a dance that we later performed and filmed in week 12. The final music input intended for week 12 was cancelled due to Julie’s illness.
Drama
As my group had already taken their turn to micro-teach last week, it was interesting to switch roles and see it from an audience’s perspective. This way I could reflect as a teacher by observing my peers and watching what teaching methods they chose to use in their drama lesson, this further enhanced my practice as I can see what methods worked best and which ones did not. Three groups in total conducted a drama lesson to our class, however one group’s lesson I found deeply meaningful. This group decided to that their target audience for their lesson would not be aimed at children or young people but adults. They decided to base their lesson on the fictional novel
Room, which we studied last year for one of our modules. As the story is based on a woman and her young son being help captive in a enclosed space by a violent rapist man, this content would be not be suitable for using in the early years. However, as we are all adults, using stories made for children did not have quite same affect as this story did. For example, they used the drama convention hot-seating to place the “Old Nick” at the subject of the audience’s questions. His principles of being sexist and discriminative to women provoked many people in the audience to feel offended, angry and uncomfortable.
Even though the aim of this module is to enable us to successfully teach the expressive arts to children, I feel this session allowed me to really understand why drama is such a powerful art form. It makes us feel in ways and experience situations we have never came across before and this can make people realise how they truly feel about an issue. After this session, I truly felt as if it had made an impact on me, which is how we want children to feel after experiencing drama. This has informed my practice greatly as I understand that we as adults need to protect children, however we also need to prepare them for potential problems that they will face in their future. After all, as Booth (1985) suggests, “storying provides students with a natural human process for finding essential meanings in the experiences of themselves and others”. It is our job as teachers to nurture children’s and support learners’ capacity to make-believe.
Dance
Our lecture was based on the importance and the benefits of providing dance education to young learners. Cone (2009) suggests that when children create dances using their own ideas, they are empowered to explore their thoughts, feelings and perspectives; building on their ability to use aesthetics to think creatively. All children should have the right to compose, perform and appreciate dance (Smith-Autard, 2002), as they can utilise these experiences to express their creativity in ways that they cannot through more traditional subjects in school.
This week we choreographed a dance related to the theme of christmas. We were given ideas of a dance lessons, such as a game or a stretch routine, and we had to come up with ways in which we could relate to the theme. This activity required us to consider the characters, a storyline and a title for our dance, as well as to consider any props or costumes that we plan to use. This throughly informed my planning and teaching skills as I thought of fun and unique ideas to implement a lesson to children. We also received feedback from our peers on what was good and what could have been improved about our ideas. This was particularly useful to me as an important part of teaching is being able to work in a team and share ideas and this activity helped me build on these communication skills.
After seeing all aspects from each of the groups we had come up with a full lesson and by the end of it we had choreographed a full dance routine. After practicing this dance over the following week, we recorded the dance in the next session. Overall, I feel like the dance input of this module has significantly developed my confidence and skills to be able to integrate dance into a child’s education. In addition, this has made remember how much I love being involved in the expressive arts and want to keep participating in these areas in the future.
Overall
My participation in this module has shown me how art integration is a valuable and complex approach to learning and teaching. It is crucial for the expressive arts to be promoted as an imperative subject area in its own right but also as a way to compliment other subject areas, as Strickland (2008, p.21) proposes, arts education acts “as the emotional glue that makes sense of the analytical world”. By nurturing children’s creativity and encouraging their creative process they will lead richer lives and, in the longer term, make a significant contribution to society.
References
Booth, D. (1985) “Imaginary gardens with real toads”: Reading and drama in education. Theory into Practice. [Online] Vol.24(3), pp.193-198. Available: Taylor and Francis. [Accessed: 6 November 2017].
Cone, T. (2009) Following Their Lead: Supporting Children’s Ideas for Creating Dances. Journal of Dance Education. [Online] Vol.9(3), pp.81-89. Available: Taylor & Francis. [Accessed 2 December 2017].
Smith-Autard, J. (2002) The Art of Dance Education. London: A & C Black Publishers Ltd.
Strickland, P. (2008) Teachers Arts Education: Integrating in the classroom. [Online] Available: https://search.proquest.com/openview/951ab9d82e4667822a3d33d0923581c6/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y [Accessed 6 December 2017].
