Week 3 Drama

In this week's lecture and subsequent workshop, unfortunately the last ones before commencement of prac in two weeks, the all-important theme of literacy continued to be paramount. I continue to be pleasantly surprised at just how much drama can be used for critical quality pedagogy in English/literacy. And to think I thought drama was only about having fun and was only an avenue for release through fun performance.

In the workshop, Victoria did a splendid job of her dramatic interpretation/reading of Voices in the Park, by Anthony Browne. This literary text was used as a stimulus for the drama and also our creativity. The book was unlike traditional children's literature as it lacked a central storyline told from the perspective of one character as well as the pivotal "tension" element. Instead, the story was told from the individual perspectives of four characters, some of whom do not even interact with each other. Victoria was able to use multiple elements of voice (starkly different pitch, tone, and pace) along with the text font to articulate the characters' personas.

Through her dramatic reading and gestures, I was able to more easily pick up on the subtleties of the characters' specific personality traits. After the reading, each of us wrote an adjective to describe the mother character; perhaps a dozen unique adjectives were written with few repeats. Then for Charles (the son), we were asked to write a simile, metaphor, or other comparative descriptor to describe him. This certainly sparked the class' creativity, at least it did mine! I wrote, "Like a cloudy day waiting for the sun to clear the skies." There were no repeat post-its, which shows the power of creativity stimulation from this activity.

Post-it notes with adjectives describing mother (left), creative descriptors for Charles (right)

The drama then happened with three still picture time sequence frames we created, with the only stipulation being that Charles and his mother were characters. We had a choice of three scenes and we chose to portray Charles going on his first vacation with his mother. We depicted our interpretation of how frozen moments in time before, during, and at the end of the vacation would look like. I played the part of Charles and my expressions went from unrestrained glee at the beginning to ambivalence & boredom during the vacation to finally a momentous outburst of anger at the end.

It was entertaining seeing how the other groups chose to portray their own interpretations of the scenarios. The following pictures depict another group's three frame sequence - Charles excitedly meeting a friend only to be dragged away at the end.

The activity was a great avenue for us to embody the personas of the characters and how we thought they'd act while also demonstrating importance of literacy. It would be a great activity to use with my future classes because it is such a fantastic way of incorporating multiple KLA areas in an engaging and dramatic way. Used in conjunction with the previous week's Reader's Theater, students will most likely enjoy working with literary texts and they'll have maximum leeway to engage their creativity & imaginations.