When I used to think of theatre, I would think it was just about acting. That its only purpose was for dramatic performances. My whole life, I would try to get away from it as much as possible, because I never saw the benefit of it. I never realized how many of my teachers were using drama skills in their classrooms and how beneficial it actually was. “The use of drama as a tool for teaching is not new: both drama and theatre have long been recognized as potent means of education and indoctrination.” (McCaslin) When I realized I had to take this class for my major, my initial thoughts were, “Am I supposed to be teaching students how to act and perform a play.” After being in the class for almost a month, my perspective in theatre has changed.
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When kids are having fun they are willing to participate more in class. If students are in a lectured based classroom, it won’t be long until they start getting distracted. “Only four to eight minutes of pure factual lecture can be tolerated before the brain seeks other stimuli, either internal (e.g., daydreaming) or external (Who is that walking down the hall?).” Which I believe is still true for college students as well, if I am just sitting down listening to the professor, it won’t even be a minute when I already start daydreaming. So why not incorporate it in the classroom, if in the end you still taught your lesson but your students had fun while learning. Incorporating drama into the classroom is just not so the students have fun while learning, it helps them develop skills. Thinking, communication, creativity, collaboration, and self-expression are just a few skills that drama would help with. “Arts education benefits the student because it cultivates the whole child, gradually building many kinds of literacy while developing intuition, reasoning, imagination, and dexterity into forms of expression and communication.” (McCaslin)These are skills that you need on a day to day …show more content…
In the elementary schools I attended we never had theater as a subject but the drama concepts were still being used in the classroom. “Very few elementary schools (8 percent) offer drama as a separate subject taught by a drama/theatre specialist. However, most schools (80 percent) do include drama/theatre in their curricula in some way. In more than half of these schools drama is included by classroom teachers using dramatic activities, such as enacting stories or plays, to teach other subjects. Another 16 percent of schools that reported instruction in drama/theatre indicated that it is incorporated into the language arts curriculum.” An activity we did this semester was acting stories, which one of them was, “caps for sale”. When we did that activity (story), I realized how much more it was more than just acting. In the story, there a variety of different subjects or skills you could have merged in with the story. For example, math could’ve been used to count the caps, self- expression when the students were acting out the story and even using their creativity when improvising some lines they might have forgot. “Integrating theater into the curriculum would benefit both teachers and students. It would inspire more creative curriculum, give students hands-on experiences, and encourage them to apply what they have learned in other
When kids are having fun they are willing to participate more in class. If students are in a lectured based classroom, it won’t be long until they start getting distracted. “Only four to eight minutes of pure factual lecture can be tolerated before the brain seeks other stimuli, either internal (e.g., daydreaming) or external (Who is that walking down the hall?).” Which I believe is still true for college students as well, if I am just sitting down listening to the professor, it won’t even be a minute when I already start daydreaming. So why not incorporate it in the classroom, if in the end you still taught your lesson but your students had fun while learning. Incorporating drama into the classroom is just not so the students have fun while learning, it helps them develop skills. Thinking, communication, creativity, collaboration, and self-expression are just a few skills that drama would help with. “Arts education benefits the student because it cultivates the whole child, gradually building many kinds of literacy while developing intuition, reasoning, imagination, and dexterity into forms of expression and communication.” (McCaslin)These are skills that you need on a day to day …show more content…
In the elementary schools I attended we never had theater as a subject but the drama concepts were still being used in the classroom. “Very few elementary schools (8 percent) offer drama as a separate subject taught by a drama/theatre specialist. However, most schools (80 percent) do include drama/theatre in their curricula in some way. In more than half of these schools drama is included by classroom teachers using dramatic activities, such as enacting stories or plays, to teach other subjects. Another 16 percent of schools that reported instruction in drama/theatre indicated that it is incorporated into the language arts curriculum.” An activity we did this semester was acting stories, which one of them was, “caps for sale”. When we did that activity (story), I realized how much more it was more than just acting. In the story, there a variety of different subjects or skills you could have merged in with the story. For example, math could’ve been used to count the caps, self- expression when the students were acting out the story and even using their creativity when improvising some lines they might have forgot. “Integrating theater into the curriculum would benefit both teachers and students. It would inspire more creative curriculum, give students hands-on experiences, and encourage them to apply what they have learned in other