Exploring issues through drama…

Have you ever used drama to explore issues and deepen understanding in your classroom?

I don’t mean having students watch plays about the topic they are studying. Nor do I mean dramatizing what they have learned. While I believe that creating a play can be an effective way to demonstrate and even assess learning, that’s not what I am referring to either.

You can read here about how we decided to provide opportunities for creativity through a choice of workshops, to enrich the learning during our inquiry into social inequity. I worked with the drama group, not because I have much expertise, but because the sessions were facilitated via Skype by Mazz in Ecuador, and it was necessary to have a teacher present in the room. Not only was it a different way for kids to engage with their learning, it was a journey of discovery for me!

Drawing on the Playback style of theatre, the group explored issues relating to social inequity, through improvisation, narrative vignettes, frozen stories and fluid sculptures.

• We used newspaper stories, articles and powerful images to stimulate thinking.
• We learned to create four sentence stories to encapsulate the big ideas.
• We considered social inequities from the perspectives of key characters in our stories.
• We empathised with the characters and portrayed different aspects of their emotions.
• We used our voices and bodies to express feelings and ideas, without having to act out the whole story.
• We experimented with symbolism and metaphor to make our performance more effective and thought provoking.

At the opening of our PYP exhibition next week, students will talk about their learning and share some of their fluid sculptures. It will be a low-key performance that focuses more on process than product, but it was incredible to see these 12-year-olds pull together all their learning to create provocative, emotive pieces, in a remarkably short time.

With a series of images to provoke their thinking, each group wrote a four sentence story and planned out their fluid sculptures. They performed these for the group who gave them constructive feedback on how to make their pieces more effective, by using different levels, making sure to connect, varying their voices and actions. They listened carefully as Mazz stressed that all feedback was relevant to everyone. Back in their groups they refined their performances, incorporating the advice they had received from their peers. 

The end results were powerful. You could hear a pin drop. The emotion was palpable…

Jordan commented at the end of the session, “I never realised that you could use drama in this way to think more deeply about issues.”

Me neither.