Wk 7: Adults, Learning Drama

Today we started the class by talking about what the others did while we were on practicum rounds. They went to Essex Primary School and they did a session based on Journalism, they all got into characters and they definitely looked like they enjoyed it in the photos they showed us. We will be doing a session when the others go on their rounds at the school based on inventions. We then began to speak about adults learning about drama, what sorts of difficulties teachers would face teaching adults, one person in our class who taught adults dance found them to be stubborn and hard to tell off. We looked at a video from Brisbane by the IDEA, this video looked at a man called Augusto Boals methods of teaching adults drama, looking into image theatre, invisible theatre and forum theatre. It looked at restoring diologue into our lives, how drama can help the powerless, drama helping adults understand the issues children face, looking at childrens emotional literiture and how diologue can become monologue. ‘Drama can comfront issues that are opressed’. The video gave us examples of what activities were done with children to help enhance their confidence and to help adults understand their emotions from inside.

Looking at the questions on the sheet that was given to us i cant say that i could answer the first question, i have not really seen any amazing drama, i dont really go to watch anyhting often enough, although i wish i did. I have watched a lot of musical theatre that has played a very big role in my life and that was what influenced me to do what i am doing with my life so i guess it had influenced me to be passionate about something!

I cant really think of any drama that is designed to influence adults but i do know that there are many childrens books out there that are very influencial. Watching the video on Boal i do beleive that that sort of video can truly influence adults into thinking deeper about situations. John O’Tool’s ‘Drama for Life’ is a fantastic way to get adults involved, i loved the way that worked for the opressed people and how they developed an understanding of what drama was through watching.

Drama is used every day to train and help adults, we use drama within work training, within CPR and First Aid training, within educational training and we use it for fun. Adults are probably very unaware of the drama that goes on in their every day lives.

I do think that most adults believe that drama is for children, that is the misconception that has always been. It is hard to get adults to understand the deeper meaning of drama, they can learn to appreciate a beautiful play or a wonderful musical but they cant seem to grasp the deeper meaning of ‘drama’. We look at John O’Tool’s drama and we can see that there is a way of getting adults more invlved.

I think that it becomes harder from this point…how do you amelioriate the factors to make drama more palatable for adult learning? They have to want to do that, you can not force someone to learn something they dont want to learn about. It is about making them aware of what drama is and how it works, how they do use drama very much in their lives and that whilst watching television and feeling captured by those characters and wishing that you too were there…that is drama!

I believe that if more work places involved role plays and more dramatic skilss within their training that adults would feel more aware of drama, teaching them about what exactly it is and how it benefits everyone in their every day lives. Even doing plays based on John O’Tools methods we would definitely get somewhere, taking real situations making them into drama and letting the audience decide how it should finish.

I think that Boals method is amazing and that i will be using this in the future for creating drama and for parents to view and get involved in, it is an intelligent way of getting people in general to understand adults.