Dialogue theatre

I thought the warm-up we did last week was extreme? Ask me again this week. 

Here we were full on exercising. We ran a couple of times, did some extreme real workout activities, and danced to music. What today's workout taught me is that we can manipulate our learners into doing something. This is something we learned about in educational studies. It is formally known as reinforcement. Rewarding good behaviour to manipulate the doer to continue doing it. In this case, Kabelo used music as a reinforcement. I noticed that most of my classmates did not want to partake in the activity, but as soon as Kabelo put on some music, most of them started putting in the work. To show further evidence that this method was functional, Kabelo turned off the music when people were not doing the right thing; he then put it on again every time they started doing the correct actions. He took it a step further by rewarding them with music they liked most whenever they would do even better. This is a highly effective method, and I plan to use it in my everyday practice as a teacher.

Today, we continued on verbatim theatre, focusing more on dialogue. We were split into groups and were in pairs. There we had to tell our partner how we got to school. The activity or the task that our partner had was to retell or re-enact the story they were told to the whole group we were put in. It took skill for someone to take a simple story they were told about how someone got to campus this morning, and create something that would entertain the audience. They had to use verbatim and not criticize the character while being careful not to overly alter the story. This was an interesting process to watch. I saw that many people think differently about the way that they approach performance. Some told the story exactly the way it was told, some imitated the mannerisms of the initial storyteller, and some tried to show us what happened without telling us explicitly. It was a fun creation to witness.

This is useful in our classrooms. We can take content, more precisely, from the history subject, and tell it either by retelling the story the way it is, re-enacting the story, or recreating a whole new performance based on the content. The teacher may be tasked to teach the learners about the story of Mahatma Gandhi. They may choose to just tell or read the story to the learners, or to make it more fun by acting out what happened, or put down a dialogue where the learners will participate in the scenes. There are multiple ways in which a story or a message may be conveyed.

Previously, we were tasked with the task of going to evesdrop on a conversation outside our classroom and writing down the dialogue verbatim. Today we had to prepare and act it out. As shown in one of my reflections weeks ago, here is my work:

Only two of my classmates were brave enough to perform their verbatim dialogues for the rest of the class. From their performances, we found that they did not need to explicitly mention details about the character and the intention of the scene; instead, we, as the audience, were able to find the content within their act and the way that they portrayed their characters. The performers also used tone and voice to interchange the characters and show what kind of people they were.