Introduction to Drama Education

     Welcome readers to the drama section of my blog! Here I will perform some exploration into the learning I have gained with regards to drama education. Drama has always been a subject I enjoyed as a grade school student because it gave me the opportunity to perform with my classmates and get up from my chair. As an active person for my entire life I have always loved being able to learn in ways that are away from my desk. Now that I am a teacher I want to give other students that same opportunity to create and perform with others. As I reflect on my first drama class I had I want to share what I have learned in regards to strategies and methods to teach drama.

     In this class we focused on the drama strategy of tableaux after a series of minds on activities to get people comfortable with sharing in front of others. To demonstrate this strategy we were asked to get into groups and create a series of tableaux based on the story we were given. In addition, each person was instructed to tell the class the character they are in the story and how their character moves the story. To build on top of this activity we performed a series of three tableaux which displays a story from beginning to end. From these activities there are two things that I learned.

The first is that tableaux is an effective way to introduce drama to students because it seems less daunting for people new to drama, yet gets them to think deeply about how they will display a story using their bodies, facial expressions, levels, etc. When performing tableaux students are required to become a character and become empathetic to that experiences that character has. Also, students have to work collaboratively to tell the story with a collection of characters, each integral to the story. Here students should consider levels, spacing, and the way the characters work together to move the story along.

     During this class I also learned about how effective drama can be in teaching other curriculum areas. In this lesson I saw how students needed to have deep reading and comprehension skills, which is crucial to a Language Arts program, when they are interpreting the story for their tableaux. In order to complete the activity students must think about the main events in the story and how they can display that to an audience. In addition, one could incorporate other subject areas into this activity, like Social Studies. You could use the stories of Canadian indigenous peoples or Canadian history or stories to illustrate social justice issues to highlight this activity. Using this strategy tableau can become an enriching exercise which expands the minds of your students while teaching them to express themselves in multiple ways.

Here are some pictures of my classmates engaged with the lesson.