Week two readings, videos and activities inspired me to try out some aspects of drama. When my daughter's friend came to play, I thought of a game for them incorporating role play.
I knew they had been
doing activities focussed on "The Lorax" for tree week. I leant up against a big
tree in the backyard and asked them to take the role of either the Once-ler or
the Lorax and try to convince each other
of the merits of cutting me down or letting me keep growing.
We played around with this for about ten to fifteen minutes, swapping characters.
I was amazed at their instant engagement in the activity and how animated and expressive they were in their conversations.
They came up with great arguments and really stepped into their roles with voice and body actions and got to act out roles and behaviours without facing the consequences (Bird et al., 2012). Role drama was described in Innes et al. (2001) as one strategy for students to explore life like situations by taking on the role of a fictional character engaging the students “cognitively and affectively” (p. 5). It was an uplifting and confidence building
experience, making me realise that simple drama activities are great for encouraging understanding of concepts and self-expression through spoken words and actions.
The Teaspoon of Light videos provided a great example of how drama can be
used to engage children with big issues and how stories can be used to make
sense of changes to their life. I really liked Peter O’Connor’s advice in the video that when using drama
in the classroom it is important to “keep your eye on the arrow and not the
target”. One of the big challenges for me in
using drama in the classroom will be to remain flexible enough to go with the
flow, and not to have fixed expectations of how the exercise might look or
where it will end up.
How can you imagine that you might use drama in the classroom Jess?
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