Teaching Through The Arts

Drama is a performing art , an outlet for self-expression, and a way of learning.  Drama is an effective learning tool because it involves the student intellectually, physically, socially, and emotionally.  Activities in improvisation, pantomime, play-making, and scene reenactment serve to develop the creative potential in the participants and help to develop critical thinking skills.  In answering the question, "Why teach drama?'", theater director and teaching artist Matt Buchanan has this to say: " Dramatic Arts education is an important means of stimulating creativity in problem solving. It can challenge students' perceptions about their world and about themselves. Dramatic exploration can provide students with an outlet for emotions, thoughts, and dreams that they might not otherwise have means to express. A student can, if only for a few moments, become another, explore a new role, try out and experiment with various personal choices and solutions to very ...

Using drama to help train future doctors? Sounds like a great idea to me. Our present educational system from kindergarten through graduate school needs a major paradigm shift. The day has long passed, if they were ever there, when lecture was an effective way to get students to learn. In fact most brain-based learning research puts lecture at a 5-10% retention rate! That is horrendous! It's very heartening to hear that the University of California, Davis is integrating medical studies with literature in an attempt to "generate future physicians with both scientific acumen and cultural humility." The article "Drama and Empathy in Medical Education" by Matharu, Howell and Fitzgerald in Literature Compass (2011), discusses how medical humanities training is often "lecture-based, not allowing for much student input," so the use of drama is an effort to remedy that. The following is from the article's abstract: "Increasingly, undergraduate and...

Here are some student reflections after taking our Northeastern University Integrating Drama and Poetry Across the Curriculum course. An immense success for me as a third grade teacher--endless ideas--realistic, valuable for real classrooms and real students. It helped me to remember how and why I went into teaching. The materials, the experiential pieces, and the collaboration empowered me. I realized that poetry is so much more than I knew. I learned how to enhance my ability to empathize with my students. For the first time I felt like someone was really teaching me how to "feel" poetry. I am so excited about building the sense of community with my class using the openers, closers and energizers. This course offered the process I need to get to the creative--the gradual, trust-building process. It provided the validation I needed to continue the great "stuff"! This course has helped me to break out of my shell! This has been the best grad course I have ever taken...

The group on the inside is using Image Theatre to depict an important moment in a story. The group on the outside is doing a gallery walk , where they get to witness the frozen tableau from all sides.