Drama

This Drama Arts-POP has been devised to demonstrate how students can through drama simultaneously learn multiple subject areas and general capabilities. In This is drama with no outside audience, where the participants use a range of types of role-play that are mixed with theatre techniques to explore a dramatic situation or a story by enacting it. The central method is usually experiential role-play, where the participants together identify and empathise with the characters and act out their roles in the story. they practise managing Dramatic tension is essential to keep any audience engaged in a drama and process drama is no exception. First and foremost, students need to understand the 'tension of the task', where in their roles they have a task that is urgent, purposeful, and that will achieve the characters’ aims. Tension may also be provided by conflict, dilemma, mystery, suspense or surprise., sustaining role, expressing themselves clearly in language and movement, and creating dramatic symbols. They develop oracy through practising in realistic contexts a challenging range of registers and functions of spoken language. At the same time, they learn geography and history and gain cultural awareness. In addition, students explore human values and ethics, as their drama takes them into decision-making about social justice and wealth distribution and they are faced with fascinating challenges and heart-breaking dilemmas.

Drama

The urge to 'make believe', to play with the real world, to create and experiment with other possible imagined worlds, is common to all societies and all ages. These activities are called 'drama', and drama's public face, when creations are performed in front of others, is called 'theatre'.  Both start at very young ages with pretend play and mature into forms of In role-play, participants step into the shoes of other individuals and live out moments of the story, physically and emotionally., This is the term used for all drama work where the players do not use a script or a given scenario, but make up the words and/or action. and plays. All drama shares the same building blocks, the elements of dramatic form, which teachers need to know, as learning in drama is learning to manage these elements.

Drama in primary school

In schools, students learn in and through their play, which becomes making dramatic art and sometimes presenting it to others. As students engage in responding to and reflecting upon their own and others' drama work, they learn about drama. In the primary years, we are mainly concerned with students' Drama learning is gaining knowledge and skills to answer the question, 'What do people do when they engage in drama?' This comprises:
• making (inventing the dramatic world through dramatic play, improvisation, role-play, play building and scriptwriting) • presenting (acting, rehearsing, and directing to perform to others) • responding (observing, reflecting on and critiquing their own drama work and that of others). to their own dramatic worlds. Since most children have been playing dramatically together from infancy, they are skilled at role-taking and creating pretend worlds. An important form of drama, and the dominant form in the earlier primary years, is process drama, which is improvised, as in this unit. There is no audience or script, and the teacher and students make drama together using a combination of experiential role-play and other theatrical activities.

Drama pedagogy

The word 'play' is a clue to drama's value and place in the primary classroom as a rich pedagogy, particularly for language. As drama's subject matter is the expression of human experiences, thoughts, motives and feelings, the teacher can structure drama to cover two or more subject areas. By agreeing to make believe together, students learn about familiar and new worlds as they learn drama.

Refer to the Drama guide and glossary for additional explanation.