integrated Arts Blog week 2
This weeks visual arts workshop was focused on killing creativity. This workshop was presented at a very coincidental time due to actions taken place by the government released this week. This was the image released…
Due to the current pandemic, the performing arts sector has been harshly effected due to the lack of career opportunities (e.g. no theatre shows, concerts etc.). In this image, the government suggests individuals who work within the performing arts rethink career choices. Personally, as a dancer myself this image made frustrated as they expect individuals to leave careers they love and have worked hard for years. This image damaged the performing arts society and really degraded many people.
Creativity in the classroom is not a consolidated structure, it provides opportunity for children to create a sense of freedom to their imagination. There are many ways to encourage creativity in a classroom such as borrowing ideas instead of owning ideas. It is about taking a piece of inspiration, making it an idea of your own by deconstructing, materializing and improving on it so it is your own personal idea. This could be applied in the classroom through avoiding the showing of art work examples and instead provide students with a stimulus to evoke ideas, and this makes their learning more individual to them. ‘Compliance to a set of ‘past practices’ and ‘orthodoxies’ (Atkinson, Hickman, 2005) that privileges technical skills and teacher-led pedagogies at the expense of creativity and more pupil-led pedagogy which privileges free expressive modes of thinking and making’ (McAuliffe, 2014). Another way to encourage creativity in the classroom would be to encourage experimentation and challenge. This could be through allowing students to chose their own colour pallets, their own theme focus’, their own materials etc. Allowing children to experiment with different artistic features allows them to become more comfortable with unfamiliar territory, and they are more likely to step outside their comfort zone. The most important standards should be thinking and working habits that in the end will produce self learning. This is helped by including self challenge, self learning choices, and enough difficulty to practice in the persistence for better answers and stronger artwork (Harris, 2014).
For our drama workshop we covered enthusiastic teaching behaviours through using body language. ‘Interactions are positive and build up self-esteem; lots of praise and constructive feedback; enthusiasm and good humour’ (Kyriacouc, 2009). As an individual who is very fond of drama, I can see the difference in engagement from the students by using body language with them. For our first year assessment for sit-comm , we had to tell a story without a script with use of body language. I seen the more enthusiastic I became about the story through gestures, eye contact, volume change, the more engaged the students became. It made me more confident as a student teacher knowing that the class wanted to listen to my story and that they were intrigued to know what happened next. We then focused on drama strategies. Drama strategies evoke imagination and creativity within a drama classroom. These skills help to build students as a whole within themselves, their performed characters and their story ( Farmer, 2020). We learned about different strategies such as freeze frame and thought tunnel. I believe that drama strategies really focus on the main purpose of a drama, the key moments and the characters. We focused on the thought tunnel, we were provided with a stimulus (Jack and the Bean Stalk) which was a small scene from this play. We were then asked what character we would personally like to focus on. I focused on Jacks mum and my group had to come up with character related questions in order to discover deeper meaning into her story and emotions. I really think this task is beneficial within a classroom as it encourages students to think outside the box and step into someone else’s’ shoes. This is also an important narrative to take in every day life, that in situations you do have to think in the mind of someone else in order to consider their emotions and how they feel, which is an important message to teach children.
REFERENCES
David Farmer (2020) Drama Resource. Available at: https://dramaresource.com/drama-strategies/ (Accessed: 3 October 2020)
Harris, A., 2016. Creativity And Education. Melbourne: Springer.
Jordan, D., 2020. Downing Street Joins Criticism Of ‘Crass’ Job Ad. [online] BBC News. Available at: <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-54505841> [Accessed 28 December 2020].
Kyriacou, C. (2009) Effective Teaching in Schools: Theory and Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press
McAuliffe, Diarmuid (2018) ‘Art and Design Education’. In T. Bryce and W. Humes (et al eds.) Scottish Education (5th Ed): Referendum, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
