How to Approach Speaking and Listening through Drama

Miftah Aulia Utami/TBI 6E/171230150

MICRO TEACHING

How to Approach Speaking and Listening through Drama

One of the best ways to do that in drama work is to be inside the drama. Many teachers see TiR as a difficult activity, particularly with older children in the primary school. Negotiate with the class that you are going to be someone with a problem. Sit on the seat with a piece of paper in your hand reading it silently to yourself. important areas for personal and social education that the children can identify with. This can show important elements of how the children see the text, what their comprehension of it is. In its most observable guise it occurs when teaching the whole class and engaging them with a piece of fiction. voice, intonation and interpretive skills, are good and, where relevant, whether accompanying illustrations have impact and resonance.

A willingness to move away from the fixed narrative to an exploration of the narrative. The use of drama strategies to explore events and their consequences, to look at alternatives and test them. (In many versions of this story the child is a ‘cripple boy’. They certainly will ask him why he is coming down the mountain and what has happened to the other children. Begin by asking the class out of role what they want to ask the child and the order of those questions. Before the drama session, decide what attitude you are going to take when questioned by the class. So much for Joe and Kerry. Why couldn’t they wait? They could see I had a stone in my shoe and had to take it out. Stop and come out of role and discuss what they have found out. At this point some questions about what the little boy saw will emerge. The boy: You should have seen it! Lights, big dipper, toffee apples. Any ride, any food, anything you want you can have.’ It’s just not fair!. It engages the class and gives them the opportunity to generate new questions and to make sense of what is happening in an interactive way. They are questioning from within the story, as if they were there. It manages the role and therefore the drama; it manages the risk, establishes where the class is and helps pupils believe in the drama. The class in groups of five have created tableaux as families taking part in bread-making in the kitchen. The class will see the Rat-catcher as overworked and probably needing help to put his/her case to the Mayor. In effective drama, children can actually feel the ‘as if’ world as real at certain points. It is not, I will teach you by telling you what you need to know – the style of much classroom teaching. Drama then teaches in the following way. Taking a moment in time, it uses the experiences of the participants, forcing them to confront their own actions and decisions and to go forward to a believable outcome in which they can gain satisfaction. The teacher, working in this way, is an important stimulus for the learning. This will help us shape up the TiR elements particularly according to how the audience is seeing things. Audiences are people who make sense of what they see in front of them. They have to switch from operating as audience to participant and back again often and suddenly. It could be that they find this difficult or, my hunch is, they’re very good at it. This is why this sort of whole group drama has so much learning potential. An example of responding to the critical incident occurred in a session on the drama based on Macbeth. to the class, it is possible to turn them into the wrong sort of audience, giving them too passive a role. When they are given opportunities to influence the outcomes, to make decisions, the drama becomes partly theirs. Disturbing the class productively Discovery/uncovering – challenge and focus The ownership also arises out of the way the teacher operates. We have to help them into the drama, making them comfortable, and then disturb that comfort productively. This community is made most effective by the teacher participating in role. The art of teaching and learning should be a synthesis from a dialectical approach. On the other hand, if the teacher participates through TiR then there can be a meeting point at which creation takes place because, in addition to planning the structure, the teacher's ideas can operate within the drama and challenge and engage with the children's ideas in a dialectic. The teacher can fully manipulate the structure from within and the resulting activity can be shown diagrammatically as in Figure 1.2. The second diagram shows the two inputs as equal, but that is not the case in practice. that demonstrate an awareness of the relationship between who we are, where we are and how we are feeling. Whereas the actor defines for the audience the message of the play within the circumstances of the plot, the teacher uses signing as an indication to the audience to join in the encounter, effecting and affecting the enterprise. As a result of this difference, an actor, using lines written as a script, behaves in a very different way from a teacher improvising within a planned structure, who has to take account of what the class will say in response to the moves he or she makes. The audience in the theatre waits for something to happen, but the participants in a drama session make it happen. The teacher must respond to these responses in an authentic way, honouring how the class see the role.

TiR in both instances must make the problems of choice apparent whilst not taking over the decision-making. A different learning area would be to have a Piper who is too full of himself, someone who needs to be taught a lesson about justice and fairness. For example, in ‘The Dream’ they can create the feelings and thoughts of any character. The teacher–taught relationship In all teaching situations there exists a power relationship between the learners and the teacher. For those aged 10 or 11 it may be the jealousy of Tim the Ostler that gains their attention. In the classroom, the pupils enter into an agreement with you the teacher that you are in charge. The authority role This is a role like the Duke in the ‘The Dream’ drama, who is presented with Egeus’s problem and has to rule on it. This figure is usually in charge of an organisation and has the class in a role subordinate to him/her. The opposer role This is a role that is often in authority but dangerous to and/or creating a problem for another role and, by extension, the class. This is a stimulating position for many pupils as the opposition of parents is something they have all experienced. The intermediate role This is often a messenger or go-between, as the servant role used in the ‘The Dream’ drama. The needing help role This is a role like Hermia, who is in need of help to fight the injustice of her father’s decision. The ordinary person This role is in the same position as the role given to the class. In a fiction what seems to be the truth is as powerful as if it were real. This strategy binds the group together, makes concrete their community and an attitude they can hold as a group. The chant is rehearsed and when it feels and sounds like an angry crowd it is ready to be used. Finally we need one person to be spokesperson to say to the Mayor what you all think. This gets louder and louder until the signal is given to stop and there is a loud knock on the door.