|
Theatre
in the classroom, The
Hindu Wednesday, Dec 17,
2003
SUJATHA
R
"When children play house,
doctor-nurse or police-thief, they
are not looking for audience. They
are constantly play-acting. We
have no excuse for not using
theatre in a classroom."
FOR ABOUT 40
schoolteachers of the city, it was a break
from their routine of controlling
exuberant children in a classroom today.
The teachers were at Goodbooks, a bookshop
in Abhiramapuram, for a workshop to
improve their efforts at passing on
knowledge to youngsters.
Maya Krishna Rao's
audience at her two-hour theatre workshop
was a mix of men and women who teach
languages and history in schools. Some
teach histrionics and most of them combine
language classes with theatre and drama
sessions, they say.
Ms. Rao began by
explaining why theatre was a way to
integrate oneself more holistically.
"Theatre is closest to life as an art
form. Characters are flesh and blood and
live a life on stage. The audience
experiences what the character goes
through," she told her listeners,
sprinkling her lecture with real-life
examples and a film show about her
workshop with teachers and students in
Delhi.
Theatre has an aura of
sophistication that children find
difficult to relate to. "Call it a
play," she says. She believes that
theatrics became part of life when a
hunter on his return home re-enacted the
hunt for those who did not participate in
the event.
Unlike adults who
perform to an audience, children don't
need one. "When children play house,
doctor-nurse or police-thief, they are not
looking for audience. They are constantly
play-acting. We have no excuse for not
using theatre in a classroom."
One way to involve
children in classroom activity and make
subjects interesting is to give them a set
of exciting circumstances. At a session
with school students, she asked them to
imagine that they lived in igloos in
Alaska. The children had to live with the
polar bear and the whale, the only other
inhabitants of the ice-capped land. The
students emerged from the experiment with
unique experiences and learnt to
appreciate life around them.
"At the bottom of
all learning processes is an emotional
reservoir." To her learning is a
process that draws on emotional, cerebral
and physical faculties. A moment of
learning is an act of living through life,
she says.
Teachers could recreate
pieces of history. A student who re-enacts
the life of a 19th century child-widow
would understand the reform movement
better, she says. "Help students to
live through the circumstances of a person
in a period of time." This, she says,
would help the student to perform well
even in the most stressful examination.
Theatre in Education
helps a child to interconnect all
subjects. "Even maths can come alive.
Moments of crisis and dilemma bring out
the best. Children have too many options
today and they have to choose."
Play-acting teaches decision-making. She
distinguishes theatre and drama. Dramatics
is about teachers using drama in classroom
while theatre could be used as a tool
early in schools, where students learn to
come up with solutions.
Photographs, paintings,
diary, even a letter from a person could
be used as tools of teaching. During her
session with Delhi teachers, the
participants learnt about citizenship when
they were put on an imaginary ship and
were told that they would never return
home.
In a session with
children when two friends were separated,
the children came up with various
solutions, some of them drawn from movies.
Students thought about suicide, terrorism
and communalism.
"If you want the
students to develop a quality, then never
put it in words. Children learn to respect
fellow beings in their own way." She
asked teachers to avoid clichés even
while telling a story.
At the workshop the
teachers also shared their experiences.
The first monthly meeting of teachers at
the Goodbooks Teacher's Centre focussed on
participatory teaching. Ms. Rao, a dancer
and Biddy Coghill, a British
theatre-in-education practitioner, put it
together.
|
