The (Out)Laws & Justice curriculum in partnership with the NYU Program in Educational Theatre, NYU and the NYU Partnership Schools Program held a Professional Development Workshop on using process drama and primary sources to teach American history. Participants included in-service social studies teachers, New York University students preparing to teach social studies, and educators interested in the topic. Seventh-graders were invited to demonstrate what process drama looks like in real time, giving workshop participants an opportunity to see young people step into role and figure out what happened in a specific historic event. These three clips give a glimpse of their work and their thinking.
The whole-group drama process is essentially, as the great drama teacher Dorothy Heathcote frequently described it, a lived at life-rate and operations from a discovery-at-this-moment basis rather than being memory based. —Planning Process Drama: Enriching teaching and learning, by Pamela Bowell and Brian S Heal.
Participants in a process drama take on roles that are required for the enquiry, investigation or exploration of the subject matter of the drama. The task of the teacher is to find ways in which to connect the students with the content and enable them to develop responses to it through active engagement and reflection. —Planning Process Drama: Enriching teaching and learning, by Pamela Bowell and Brian S Heal.
As we set about creating process dramas with our students, we can hold in the back of our mind that a developing body of understanding seems to support the drama teachers’ long-held belief that children are predisposed to learn through drama, because the evidence seems to be showing that our brains need to ‘rehearse’ life in order for us to learn. Process drama creates no-penalty, fictional circumstances in which we can do just that. —Planning Process Drama: Enriching teaching and learning, by Pamela Bowell and Brian S Heal.
We are honored that (Out)Laws & Justice is included as a case study in an important new book that will be used by drama and theatre university instructors who are teaching the next generation of middle and high school teachers. Theatre for Change: Education, Social Action and Therapy by Robert J. Landy and David T. Montgomery who are, respectively, a Professor of Educational Theatre and Applied Psychology and Clinical Assistant Professor for the Program in Educational Theatre at New York University. The book provides an international overview of the latest work and thinking in Drama and Education, and features interviews with a worldwide variety of leading practitioners and theorists. The book explores how Educational Theatre, Applied Theatre and Drama Therapy facilitate change within schools, community centers, prisons, and theatres.
While middle and high schools teacher and administrators who value the benefits of arts education, few in our experience, have the background or knowledge of how educational drama improves students’ academic achievement. Theatre for Change offers an eagle’s eye overview and close analysis of specific practices that explore and makes meaning of human events through the application of drama and theatre. For (Out)Laws & Justice students, these practices opens up and allows students in history and social science classes and in English language arts classes to themselves identity the problems and generate questions that are moral, social and political in the events and literature that they study.
It is thrilling that (Out)Laws & Justice is part of the effort by experienced and exceptional facilitators in schools and communities around the world. Theatre, in all of its manifestations, is essentially concerned with change.
Buy Theatre For Change on Amazon.
You can also help support the ongoing work of (Out)Laws & Justice by making a donation today.
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Theatre for Change: Education, Social Action and Therapy~ David T. Montgomery (author) More about this product
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