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!

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!