Using+Collaborative+Drama+Strategies+to+Explore+Text

Using Collaborative Drama Strategies to Explore Text By: Courtney Mason      NetGeners are natural collaborators. This is the relationship generation. -Don Tapscott Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much. -Helen Keller

Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths pure theatre. -Gail Godwin toc

= **What is collaboration?** = = =



Working together toward a common goal.

Image License: Creative Commons

= **Why is collaboration essential to teaching effectively?** =

Collaboration is essential to effective teaching because it allows students to work together in a way that allows each one of them to contribute their own unique set of skills and ideas to the work.

= **How can drama strategies help us to explore text in an ELA classroom?** =

Drama strategies involve using multiple intelligences to explore text. The skills and experiences inherent in the teamwork of a drama classroom enable students to understand not only texts, but themselves and each other on many levels. Drama activities are intellectual, physical, social and artistic and they enhance not only English, but all subjects. Drama production. Image License - Creative Commons

"The simultaneous presence of the real and the fictional in drama encourages multiple and creative forms of expression and frames of mind not commonly found in classrooms." -Wayne Booth, //The Rhetoric of Fiction//

= **Sample Activities** =
 * **What's beyond the door?:**  a strategy that can be used effectively when working with setting in a novel or short story. Students enter the place described in the text and explore the environment silently, using imagination and mime. The other students observe and in their turn build on elements of setting that are established through the exercise.
 * **Other side of the text: ** when working with any first person narrative or dramatic monologue (ie. Hamlet's dagger speech), work as a group to determine the speech that might result in the written text (either an inner voice or an additional character). Essentially, the group transforms the monologue or narrative into a dialogue. This activity allows students to better understand the text by examining where its origins.

= = = **Sample Lessons** =

This chapter looks at drama strategies that can be used in the study of To Kill a Mockingbird -Tableaux: students use their bodies to represent a significant moment in the story -Role Play: following the tableaux, students are asked to become the citizens of the town of Maycomb. -Teacher-in-Role: the teacher takes on the role of a social work who visits a local family.
 * **From Taylor and Warner, Structure and Spontaneity: The Process Drama of Cecily O'Neill, Chapter 6: "Transforming Texts: Intelligences in Action" (2006) **
 * **Lesson from Grade 10 Dramatic Arts Course Profile: Working with Shakespearean Text **

-Allow students to create their own monologues or scenes based on a Shakespearean monologue or scene they are working with in class. Students can dissect the language and gain more from the text if they are given the opportunity to put the text into their own words.
 * **Translating Shakespearean Text into Contemporary Speech **

-**Example:**


 * JULIET **
 * O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo? **
 * Deny thy father and refuse thy name; **
 * Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, **
 * And I'll no longer be a Capulet. **

**-Translation:**
 * JULIET **
 * Why does your name have to be Romeo Montague? **
 * I wish you had any other name in the world. **
 * Can't you just ditch your family? **
 * Or if you can't, but you swear that you love me, **
 * I'll give up my family. **

= **Glossary of terms** =


 * **Tableaux:** drawing on abilities related to movement, visualization and interaction with space, tableaux can be used to discover and display what the students already know about a topic or theme; to develop a chronology of significant moments in the story; or to predict different outcomes.
 * **Role Play:** students are called upon to grasp the perspectives of the characters in the story and to act upon those understandings in empathetic and insightful ways, by drawing on their intra-personal intelligence.
 * **Teacher-in-Role:** the teacher works in a role from the text to initiate the drama, create atmosphere, model appropriate behaviour and language, support the students' efforts and encourage the students' responses

= **Resource List** =


 * The Ontario Council of Drama and Dance Educators [|www.code.on.ca]
 * Collaborative English and Drama Resources [|http://www.collaborativelearning.org/ englishdramaonline.html]
 * Grade 10 Dramatic Arts Course Profile: [|http://www.curriculum.org/csc/library/ profiles/10/arts_p.shtml]
 * Story Drama (by David Booth)
 * Structuring Drama Work (by Jonothan Neelands)
 * Making Sense of Drama: A Classroom Guide (by Jonothan Neelands): specifically Chapter 2: Beowulf- A Sample Lesson.
 * Collected Writings on Education and Drama (by Dorothy Heathcote)
 * Drama Structures: A Practical Handbook for Teachers (by Cecily O'Neill and Alan Lambert)
 * Structure and Spontaneity: The Process Drama of Cecily O'Neill (edited by Philip Taylor and Christine D. Warner)

=<span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal;">**Video Exploration of Collaborative Strategies** =


 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 10pt;">Dead Poet's Society: An example of effective collaboration in the classroom (please view clip from 2:54-4:30) **

media type="youtube" key="-meLjxRTg8A?fs=1" height="385" width="480"

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">Video: In this clip from the film Dead Poet's Society, Mr. Keating uses an unconventional method of collaboration to allow his students to further explore the poetry they have been studying in their English class.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 10pt; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">Summer Heights High: An example of ineffective collaboration in the classroom **

media type="youtube" key="Z_qh3urEOK8?fs=1" height="385" width="480" <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Video: Summer Heights High, an Australian mockumentary, showcases the ridiculous antics of Mr. G, the high school drama teacher. This character gives all drama teachers a bad name, and explicitly portrays what NOT to do in a classroom. Instead of teaching his students to collaborate, Mr. G chooses to perform for them instead.

=**<span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 12pt;">A Final Bit of Inspiration **=

**10 Lessons the Arts Teach** 1. The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships. Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgment rather than rules that prevail. 2. The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer. 3. The arts celebrate multiple perspectives. One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world. 4. The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solving purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds. 5. The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition. 6. The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects. The arts traffic in subtleties. 7. The arts teach students to think through and within a material. All art forms employ some means through which images become real. 8. The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said. When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job. 9. The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling. 10. The arts' position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believe is important.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">SOURCE: Eisner, E. (2002). The Arts and the Creation of Mind, In Chapter 4, What the Arts Teach and How It Shows. (pp. 70-92). Yale University Press. Available from NAEA Publications. NAEA grants reprint permission for this excerpt from Ten Lessons with proper acknowledgment of its source and NAEA.

=**<span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 12pt;">References **=


 * http://www.curriculum.org/csc/library/profiles/10/arts_p.shtml
 * http://www.brainyquote.com
 * Creative Commons
 * Drama Structures: A Practical Handbook for Teachers (by Cecily O'Neill and Alan Lambert)
 * Structure and Spontaneity: The Process Drama of Cecily O'Neill (edited by Philip Taylor and Christine D. Warner)
 * Growing up Digital (Don Tapscott)