Drama

The group drama was an interesting experience. When we were told about it I was really excited. It sounded like something that had the potential to be fun and we got to work with a group of peers which is always enjoyable. Our group formed very quickly. We were all people who had spent a lot of time talking to each other already and were friendly with each other. We started work almost immediately picking a topic. We threw out a lot of ideas but eventually decided we were going to do a piece around the anxieties people have when walking into a new classroom. One new class member was dyslexic and anxious about returning to education, one was the only man in a class of women and one was a foreign student who felt their experiences were disregarded. We decided to have two bubbles, a good bubble and a bad bubble, who would say the thoughts of these three learners out loud so the audience could hear. We also had two teachers, one who disregarded the fears and another who addressed them. I think our piece portrayed our point well, namely that, just because our learners aren’t saying their anxieties out loud doesn’t mean they’re not there. We need to, as teachers, be aware of this and ensure that we check in with our learners regularly and see how they are doing.

Overall we worked very well as a team. We made time to meet regularly and practice our piece. This was very helpful when we had to then perform it in front of the rest of our class. Being friendly with the other members of the group was extremely helpful as we were able to pull each other up if there was an issue and not allow it to destroy the work we had done so far. There were two issues in our group, one was that there were too many people trying to be the leader and another was the tendency of one member to improvise. Looking back, the role of leader should have been assigned when we first formed. Groups will generally need some form of leader and it was naive to think that we didn’t. It started a power struggle between three members of the group which was very uncomfortable to be around. They each started to give different instructions and for the first two meetings we had, we got absolutely nothing productive done. Before the group left on the second night of this, we decided that we would need to appoint a leader. We did this by secret ballot and the new leader steered the ship for the rest of the time. Appointing a leader was a big switch in our productivity. We became a very efficient team and got a lot of work done in each meeting.

The second issue, the improviser. She had a tendency to change her part every time we ran the piece. She would add lines for herself in inappropriate places or loudly have her character make a scene. It started to make everyone uncomfortable and we began to fear what she would say at the actual performance. Especially because much of what she had said was incredibly inappropriate and rude, particularly to one member of the group who took some of it personally. This same member kept trying to change the piece after it had already been finalised toward the beginning of the assignment. In that situation, I had a word with her and it seemed to solve the problem. The improvising problem got so bad that another word had to be had. This fell to me again as I was the most friendly with her. I sat her down and told her that it was inappropriate, she was jeopardising the hard work the rest of us had done and that she had made people feel uncomfortable and attacked. Upon talking to her, she seemed to believe that she was just having the craic and didn't realise how much it was upsetting the rest of us. This conversation solved the problem and the rest of the work on the drama went well.

We were very good at utilising people’s individual talents to achieve what we wanted. Some people were more quiet and wanted to remain as background characters, some wanted to be more upfront. My part was assigned to me because it suited the kind of sarcastic humour that I have. One of the lads made the cast list and the bubble costumes. Other people chipped in with ideas and personal experiences so that our piece felt as real as possible. In the end I think it stood to us as a team and we did a good job.

Workshop on Technology in the Classroom keyboard_arrow_right