Sharing Experiences

As part of the creative process for our collective (The Theatre part of the Dinner Theatre I’m working on) students wrote found poems using newspaper articles about their neighbourhood. Due to poverty and all the various isms that are alive in our world (racism/classism/ageism, etc.) almost all of the articles portray the neighbourhood negatively. To give you a sense, here are a few of the headlines: Break and Enters Rise; Trial Set for Teenager Accused of Lighting 80 Fires; 20 Years for Double Slaying; Twelve Sub-standard Homes Shut Down — I think you get the point.

One young woman in my class chose the article entitled Pit Bull Used as Weapon Against Officers, Police Claim. When explaining her poem to me, she asked if it was alright that she called the dog Champ, since that was his name. She told me that she knew the dog, and was so sad when it was shot by the Police. This led into a discussion about the stories we were reading. The students noted that only one side of the story was told, and it never included anything positive. We decided that part of our show will tell those stories to add some humanity to the negative daily (it really is daily!) press the neighbourhood receives.

Another activity students did was to list confessions about things they did. These were then reworded to begin with “we” in order to reflect the universality of their experiences amongst students their age. I used this activity to try to help the students understand that their realities are not all that different from those of other students. One confession was “We drink too much.” I related a story from years ago when some friends and I rented a house near one of the cities most prestigious high schools. Coming home from a night out, I passed hundreds, literally hundreds, of teenagers walking down the street. As I got closer to my place, teens were pouring out of the neighbour’s house, and a police car was there. However, there was no media coverage the next day. I asked my students if they thought that it would be in the paper if there was a party of teens that had to be broken up by the police in their neighbourhood, and they thought it would for sure. This led us to another discussion on the media, and what they choose to report, or not report.

So, it was a very satisfying week – however, we are running short on time. We have nine days until Easter (2.5 days of which we are on field trips touring theatres or watching plays) and after Easter, we have a week to pull it together. Oh my.

Holidays/Back to Work

Well, here we are — just one more day of Christmas holidays left. I had a productive break, to say the least. In between a lot of visiting with friends and family, we painted the main floor of our house (including the lovely tall walls thanks to the vaulted ceiling) and managed to both get sick. I’m excited to get back to work, because there’s only three weeks left in this quarter, and come February 1st, we’re embarking on the integrated curriculum Grade 10 Dinner Theatre Project.

I’ve mentioned the project before, but here’s the summary again – all grade ten students will be enrolled, and will be with us all day as they earn credits in English, Information Processing, Entrepreneurship, and Foods or Drama by completing activities/tasks/assignments relating directly to the planning and performing of a dinner theatre. The hope is that the tangible nature of the learning will increase student attendance and, ultimately, retention in school. We’ve had great support from the school board thus far, providing us with time away from the classroom to prepare. That isn’t to say that we have everything figured out – but we are well on our way.

I’m teaching the Drama 10 component, where we will be doing some improv and contextual drama before creating a collective, the “theatre” part of the program. I’m excited to work with the students and draw on their experiences and backgrounds to build a piece of theatre that is poignant, thoughtful, and witty. Working with my improv team was like a mini-warm up for me — I can’t wait!

One great article I found (or was sent by a friend, I should say) was about interviewing community members, and turning their stories into monologues. Basically, students go out into their community, record interviews with people, transcribe them, edit where needed, and perform them. I think it’s a great way to provide dramatic distance for the actresses/actors as they portray some of the realities of life in their neighbourhood.

As we get closer, I’ll keep you posted on the progress. I’m so excited I’ve decided to change the focus of my thesis (not that I did anything more than write a proposal up to this point, mind you) to a qualitative study of project based instruction, examining the effect on both students and teachers. I’ll start doing background reading once I’m done the grad class I start on Tuesday (only 14 weeks left!) and hopefully be able to collect some data the next time we run the project. Or the time after. We’ll see how fast I read.