Dance and Drama are often considered subjects that offer little value to a student’s education.
Dance and Drama are both considered to offer little value but these are subjects that offer great importance to a student’s education. These allow the students to access their creative abilities and help build their understanding of the topics they are learning in the classroom. Many students use drama to be able to extend their understanding of the topic they are learning in each of the Key Learning Areas, but also allows students to develop into quick thinking, problem solving, and persevering members of society.
Drama has been continuously left behind in students education for many reasons. These include the fact many teachers feel that it is of little or no value to students. They also feel as though it has no place in the classroom setting of order, tidiness and structure. Some teachers find that they can not make the time for drama as they need more time for literacy and numeracy where there are tests such as NAPLAN which take precedence and receive government funding. However is stated in Creative Arts Teaching and Practice, drama can and should be used to “develop fine motor skills; assist in the development of social skills; develop student confidence; and enrich learning throughout the curriculum as cross-curricular programming.” (Alter, F., Hays, T., and O'Hara, R. 2009). Consequently teachers need to incorporate the arts into all areas of learning to ensure that students are given the skills to develop their academic, social and physical being.
Another reason teachers are failing to make time for the creative arts is due to a lack of certainty in their ability to teach and an absence of understanding to the broad curriculum. What teachers do not realise is that drama builds on a student's understanding to be able to develop stronger comprehensive knowledge and use their minds in different ways to creatively address their work in the tested subjects. If teachers incorporate drama into all KLAs, as well as specific teaching drama, the students will become motivated. This is supported by Eric Oddleifson “the arts are cognitive domains that trigger multiple forms of learning.” (1994). In saying this it
When a student is forced to take a class, they do not pay attention. Students already ignore the daily lectures given by their teachers to inform them about the classwork for the day. If they were forced to take a music, art or drama it is likely that they will ignore them more. If the student does not possess the skill and they are forced to take the class, this will only be a given that they will ignore the teacher.
As well as the quality of spoken language that children hear on a day to day basis will have a vast impact on the grammar and language they use. Therefore teachers and all teaching staff should ensure they continue to develop children’s confidence when it comes to communication by developing the skills needed to explain their understanding this is also vital when it comes to understanding and explaining of books or other recourses. All children should have access to and be encouraged to develop their role in drama. Pupils should be able to adopt, create and sustain a range of roles, responding appropriately to others in role. They should have opportunities to improvise, devise and script drama for one another and a range of audiences, as well as to rehearse, refine, share and respond thoughtfully to drama and theatre
Despite taking the place of a core class, fine arts can bolster and strengthen a student’s abilities in said core classes. Art is accessible to everyone and therefore can create a new sense of unity and connection among peers in and out of school. Students often don’t have many ways to express themselves, but by taking classes in the fine arts, students would have an expressive medium to do so inside of school. Skills learnt in fine arts classes can be used for a student’s entire life, regardless of age or condition, and thanks to the many other advantages of these courses, should be required for students to
Students will gain an understanding of how form in dance and music relate. They will increase their knowledge of movement vocabulary by applying it through choreography. Weekly exposure to new movements
The timeline of the drama program is it would start in October and end in May. The program will include teachers and community members as volunteers. Ideally, the people who volunteer would be interested in the arts such as: music, art, dance and acting. But, experience in those fields is not required. The students will have the opportunity to learn reading comprehension skills such as: sequence of events, vocabulary and summarization. The students will choose one book to read and study per month, and the activities will coordinate with those books. The books the children will choose from will vary in topic and difficulty, but will be on the 2nd grade reading level. The drama techniques that will be used are: hotseating, role-play and tableaux.
Dramatic play is one of the most important and useful center for children in the classroom. By playing in dramatic play they can develop their physical, cognitive, linguistic, social and emotional domains. In the article “Supporting Language: Culturally Rich Dramatic Play” the author state” Mrs. Ramos invites them to talk about their weekend activities. Rodrigo says he and his grandmother went to the panaderia (bakery). Two children ask, “What is that?” Juanita explains, “That’s a bakery where you buy bread and cake.” Mrs. Ramos says she and her mother used to go to the panaderia when she was a child. The children smile.” This a further proof of how children can develop their cognitive, linguistic
The student will be able to role play characters from a drama using theatrical intonation, pitch, and clarity within their voices.
During this drama activity the teacher will take on the role of Pearl Gibbs, explaining her life and some of her achievements to the students. Firstly the teacher will discuss that a very important guest is coming in today to share with us about her life, but the teacher will not be able to stay to hear it so the students will have to listen carefully, take notes and ask lots of questions to relay what Gibbs has shared with them. The teacher will then leave the room and come back in as Pearl Gibbs, using props such as glasses, an aboriginal flag and take on the role of Pearl Gibbs. The students would have been involved in the teacher in role activity before so they understand what is happening. During this role the teacher excites interest, control action, provoke tension, challenges thinking, assess knowledge, meanwhile is teaching the students in an engaging and inclusive way about an historical Indigenous person (Gibson & Ewing, 2011).
Pace drama provided me with an outlet since my freshman year to release this passion of art with so many different people. Drama,like the rest of Monsignor Pace is very culturally diverse, and is thus is one of the many reasons I believe that regardless of all our differences in the end we are all the same. In drama our common bond is the passion for art. As a young adult it is important to remind myself, along with everyone else, that though we don't all look the same, sound the same, or have the same historical backgrounds, at the end of the day we all love the same thing. Instead of using our differences to tear us down, collectively we,dancers, singers, actors and technicians, all share our commonalities to contribute to our environment in bringing plays, musicals and art into the
Dr. Rekha S. Rajan writes about how she implemented a twenty-minute structured dramatic play into class time to encourage children to learn to solve conflicts on their own. She first does this by gaining insight on the children’s feelings with a personal story time. Each child tells a story that made them particularly sad, mad, upset, or happy. She then takes those experiences and creates a pre-determined scenario to which, the children will play different roles, share ideas, and come up with a solution.
Before my senior year of high school, I was a very shy, closed-off individual. However, my last year I wanted to change that. The primary way I sought to do this was through participating in high school theater. If I was given $10,000 and 30 days, I, Jacob Smith, would put forth these resources towards the improvement of Roxana High School’s drama department.
(“Benefits” 1). Fran Smith chimes in that “arts learning can also improve motivation, concentration, confidence, and teamwork” (2). Being able to open up and verbalize feelings through the art of drama will give students a different perspective on the outlook of life. The world is always telling students what to be, how to look, what to wear, what is cool and what is not; however, being able to express oneself through the Fine Arts can let the youth shine their own light.
A student’s ability to enjoy and participate in arts instruction can help, not hinder, the students learning and comprehension in other classes. The arts classes give students creativity that sometimes can not be achieved in an average english, science, or math class. “Students need to be creative and need to understand that being creative is as important as being proficient in skills areas like math and reading. Learning basic language and math skills should be accomplished in all public schools- not at the expence of arts, but in addition to them” (Ford and
The first reason why teachers should integrate dance into education is that dance increases students’ attention and reaches students of different learning types. One study was done to determine whether lessons that incorporate movement were effective at generating student’s situational interest. They compared the outcomes of movement and non movement lessons in second and third grade reading and math classes. The teachers provided one week of lessons that included movement and one week of lessons that did not. Students were asked to use their bodies to illustrate specific concepts they were taught. At the end of the study, the teachers rated students’ interest levels, and they found that students were more excited by and engaged in the lessons that integrated movement than those that did not. Surprisingly, they also found that the dancing did not hinder the amount of content learned during the lesson (Lindt and Miller). Dance could be a
Despite the claim that Drama in Education ( DIE) as a pedagogy dimmed its popularity in the Western world since 1990 until 2016 (Gallagher, et al. , 2017), in the year of 2011, Morrow, et al. included it as one of the best practices in literacy instruction. Some of the teachers who had the experience of trying process drama in their classrooms found that the pedagogy improved students’ participations, pushed students to use their imaginations, performed deeper understanding of the topics being learned and made the students learn to have empathy ( Long, 1998). Do the voices from the classroom resemble to what researchers and theories have to say on process drama?