Jo Blogs Drama Education

Nyssa is in my office asking about blogs.

Remarkably  students managed to navigate several timetable obstacles, unit code obfuscation and car parking woes to make it to the first Deakin Uni Drama Ed classes for 2008. This morning’s Drama Ed A was a full house and there was plenty of positive energy!

A good bit of the first session is dedicated to finding out a little about each other. I am always impressed by the wide range of experiences that students bring to classes in Drama Ed. There is a lot of passion and enthusiasm for drama in the session today to propel us through the semester.

I presented my drama ed biography in a series of images. A picture paints a thousand words - as someone remarked today…Don’t know quite what this one says!

Having gained some understanding of who makes up the class and how each individual came to be in drama education, we considered drama and its place in the curriculum within Victoria. We looked briefly at VELS and considered where drama sits in relation to each of the 3 strands of VELS.

We considered Development in Drama - cultural, anthropological and personal through some of the theories of  Richard Courtney. We also spent more than a bit of time considering children’s dramatic play and learning and its relationship to drama - and touched on the work of Peter Slade and his notion of Child Drama. There is never enough time to cover the theory in much detail during class (even in a 3 hour class) which is why the required reading becomes so important.

The unit Drama for Learning Across the Curriculum in the afternoon was a smaller class of drama ed warriors - we had a much deeper discussion on play, drama and learning, did some planning for imaginative play spaces and trialled a process drama beginning with  dramatic play - this provided some rich discussion. Discussion of imaginative play and drama ed always brings to mind my own children’s play - and they inevitably end up as examples in the discussion. They are such super-dramatists after all!

One of the great joys of this summer has been collaborating with my Deakin arts ed colleagues to create our Deakin Arts Education Centre on our island in Second Life. We have been working with Gary Hayes, Head of Virtual Worlds at The Project Factory to bring our ideas into virtual reality.

We began by creating our avatars and spent some time ‘in world’ exploring many SL islands to try to imagine what might be possible for our Arts Education community. The building began with a bare island and a lot of imagining. We provided a brief to Gary Hayes and over several weeks the infrastructure began to appear. Our buildings are modern buildings almost entirely off the ground interconnected by a series of aerial walkways - it is complex and Escher-esque. My colleagues, Jenny Grenfell aka Belle Shan (Visual Art) and Fiona Phillips aka Yasmar Arida(music) have spent many wonderful hours meeting  in world to work on the project. We have got lots of great meeting places on our island - one is a giant floating fruit bowl where you can sit on banana seats around a fruit salad stage. We have also met others in Second Life and are really looking forward to meeting some of our students in there as we open the doors to our wonderful, new virtual Arts Ed facilities

Meet Kismet Cazalet - my avatar

Its difficult to describe what the island has to offer- a welcome area/arrival deck with its own Deakin Bard, dedicated studios for each art area, a multi story art gallery, performance spaces ranging from large amphitheatres and festival spaces to intimate fire side performance areas on beach.

You can teleport from place to place on the island or of course walk or fly around the island but there are also, bicycles, motor bikes and row boats. You can also take a flying guided tour.

The Drama Education space has a lounge and library section - with a video screen. A laptop for immediate access to this blog and other drama ed sites. A seating area with cushions, a screen for slide shows, a stage areas with changeable backdrops and theatrical lighting effects and access to two holodecks. One is next door - this one takes you into a wide range of different environments  (or scene changes) ranging from a medieval church to mountain top to under the ocean. The other holodeck is one that you teleport to from the Drama Studio - its 600 metres in the air above the drama studio. This one has a selection of rooms that can easily be changed around you - instant scene changes from bedroom to office to dance club.

Kismet under the sea

If you have not yet been in SL, you can join - it is free but you will need a good computer and internet access. Click here to find out more and join. You’ll be asked to create your avatar and then spend some time on orientation island getting your SL legs.

It is now only a couple of weeks before students return for the start of  new academic year. That is when things get really busy. Although I intend to keep this blog going throughout the semester, there is probably no better time for reflection than this period - the calm before the storm. Not that summer has seemed all that calm. Here are some of the things I have been working on since the beginning of the year: selection officer  for the BArts/B Teach combined degree; co-ordination of week zero for the School of Education; preparation of unit guides; meetings, meetings, meetings; creation of my drama space on Deakin University Island in Second Life as part of a major project (more on that later; preparation for a keynote speech I’ll give for Drama Tasmania in April; year planning with Drama Victoria; preparation of reports for the Drama Australia executive; teaching a module in a Teacher Refresher course; phasing out vineblogs for the Drama Australia VINE project.. and so on.

Most of these activities plus several more will continue throughout the semester so I often wonder at this time of year how I will fit in the teaching. However, I usually find that with the reappearance of students on campus comes a real surge of energy and I remember again what the main game is!