The creative/productive, cultural/historical and critical/responsive components of the drama curriculum are designed to provide students with opportunities to:
As students enter the middle years, they are prepared to undertake drama work which affirms and extends their previous drama experiences.
The approach taken to the teaching and learning of drama in the elementary Arts Education curriculum is "drama in context". Drama in context means, as it suggests, that dramas are structured to provide a context, a situation or a metaphoric framework in which students and teacher work together. Within each drama, students and teacher assume roles and enter into a fictional world prepared to accept and "live through" an imagined situation.
A "collective creation" is a play or a collection of episodes or scenes which is developed and performed by a group.
The middle years drama curriculum recommends that students continue their exploration of ideas and dramatic art form within dramatic contexts and extend that work through a process of shaping, refining, polishing and, possibly, performing a collective creation. Thus, during the middle years drama program, students will become increasingly able to communicate their intended ideas through dramatic art form and may have the opportunity to do so for audiences beyond their classroom.
| Teacher Note: Drama in context is also referred to as role drama, drama for understanding and whole group drama. |
The three components are interwoven into the drama work to ensure that students become aware of the connections between their work and their world. Students should be encouraged to discuss and respond to these connections, and to individual and collective contributions at each step of the work.
The creative/productive component is realized as the students work with their teacher within dramatic contexts and as they shape and refine their ideas toward more polished work. Through this component, the students will develop the ability to recall, react to and describe, both in and out of role, their drama experiences. Times for reflection provide the students with the opportunity to assess their work and the work of others. Reflection serves to deepen their understanding of the drama work and enables them to make more carefully considered contributions to the work. In this way the critical/responsive component acts within, and strengthens, the dramatic situations.
Drama work is directed and shaped by the connections that students make between the particular dramatic situation and the world around them. The cultural/historical component encourages students to learn about the dramatic art form and how it relates to human existence. It strives to develop students' understanding of the role of drama in various cultures and societies. While this knowledge may at times be acquired in ways which are peripheral to their own dramas, it supports students in making and understanding the connections between their own work and the work of dramatic artists with which they will become familiar. More importantly, perhaps, it will enable the students to gradually begin to view their own work as worthy artistic endeavour, and will make them increasingly aware of some of the ways in which artists get ideas.
The goal of the critical/responsive component is to provide students with opportunities to gain a lasting appreciation of the dramatic art form. In their drama work, as in their lives (drama is, after all, a precise metaphor for life), the students are simultaneously participant and spectator. As dramatic situations unfold, the points-of-view of the students and the teacher shift back and forth between that of actor and that of audience. Those periods of reflection discussed above provide an effective means by which teachers can guide their students toward the achievement of this goal. As well, within their schools and communities most students will have opportunities to act as audience in the more formal sense; that is, as theatre-goers. The section "Looking at Plays" is provided to help teachers guide their students to greater understanding and enjoyment of those theatre experiences.
Drama is an art form that is concerned with the representation of people in time and space, their actions and consequences of their actions. Dramatic art form is symbolic representation of experience. It seeks (as do all art forms) to uncover meaning. It strives to help us make sense of experience.
This curriculum is concerned with teaching and learning through dramatic art form. Teachers must, therefore, be aware of and apply the elements of theatre form when structuring, "living through", shaping and refining drama work with their students.
The following elements of theatre form are ones that teachers of middle years students should be familiar with:
| Focus | Tension | Contrasts | Symbol |
|
| | | |
Gavin Bolton (1986) has pointed out that the elements of theatre, applied by the teacher when structuring drama work, are the same ones used by the playwright.
As the playwright focuses the meaning for the audience, so the teacher helps to focus meaning for the children; as the play wright builds tension for the audience, the teacher builds tension for the children; as the playwright and the director and the actors highlight meaning for the audience by the use of contrast in sound, light and movement, so does the teacher -- for the children; as the playwright chooses with great care the symbolic actions and objects that will operate at many levels of meaning for the audience, so will the teacher help the children find symbols in their work. (p. 166)
The inclusion of these elements into drama lessons provides the aesthetic dimension; that which Cecily O'Neill (1983) refers to as the "intrinsic educational value that the process of art can have -- the quality of thinking and feeling that it can bring to children's understanding" (p. 29).
In the middle years drama class, it is this "quality of thinking and feeling" -- the internal actions which drama evokes, rather than the external actions of speaking and doing -- that is of primary concern.