Applied Drama

This has been an amazing year, studying Applied Theatre (Drama in the Community and Drama Education) at the Central School of Speech and Drama.  Can’t wait to continue with work in The Netherlands. Will keep the blog updated as soon as I’m settled in again. Thank you for following so far! Suzanxx

Midst of MA dissertation-stress a guest post by my amazing colleague and dear friend Alyssa Grace Sorresso. Alyssa is a writer and applied theatre practitioner hailing from the windy city of Chicago. She is currently finishing her Master in Applied Theatre at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. You can find more of her work on her website or follow her as tactless_grace on twitter.

I recently listened to a fantastic WNYC Radiolab podcast episode called Help! which showcased people devising creative ways to help themselves out of a bind.

A particularly interesting segment focused on an interview with Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love. Gilbert talks about bargaining with her muses. She references an interview she conducted with Tom Waits, a famous American singer-songwriter, in which he described openly conversing with his songs; bargaining, yelling, and cajoling them out of his brain and (more…)

As part of my part of my MA in “Applied Theatre (Drama in the Community and Drama Education)” at the Central School of Speech and Drama I’ve conducted a research project with four classmates into the meaning of risk within education. In this blogpost I would like to share some of our theoretical findings about risk in education. In future posts, I will share about us researcher as risk-assesors, and the use of clowning in this research.

Growing up in our education system

What are the messages young people get exposed to about risk? Young people growing up in our education system today get different messages about risk, because there are different paradigms on risk in the socio – political context surrounding them. According to the NESTA REPORT of 2010 “learning to take risk, learning to succeed” there are two conflicting (more…)

As you can read in my previous post about term three, I am following the course “writing with communities” as part of my MA in “Applied Theatre (Drama in the Community and Drama Education)” at the Central School of Speech and Drama. My tutor for this course is Sara Clifford. She works as a play writer and drama practitioner in different community settings, such as educational, health and criminal justice settings. At the moment she is working on a site specific community theatre play for Newhaven Ferry, supported by the Arts Council

I enjoy following this course a lot.

Writing with communities is all about the different community settings (more…)

I’m not doing this master “Applied Theatre (Drama in the Community and Drama Education)” at the Central School of Speech and Drama by myself. I’m part of an amazing group of very ambitious and extremely talented people. Over the past weeks I’ve been stunned to see each of them getting involved in very challenging projects, either here in London, Ecuador, India or Mexico.

Term 3 started a few weeks ago and this term is entirely focused on practical work we do in projects we set up ourselves or we deliver at placements. This means that before our summer “joy” of dissertation starts, we are putting all our skills and knowledge gained so far in practice.

This blog is about us, about my future network. I’m extremely proud (more…)

As promised in my first post about drama and education, I have given the way we learn some more thought. I also expressed the hope that I soon could use drama as a practice for participatory and engaged learning. So I did, and I can conclude from my own experience now that using drama and creativity is an immense resource for learning.

The most important thing is that drama or creativity connects our minds with our bodies, and then connects us with the world we live in. Learning takes place because we have physical experiences, because we identify and explore the subject to be learned by actually doing it or acting it out (see if you want to learn more about this for instance “Out of our minds, learning to be creative” by Ken Robinson (2001)).

My personal experience is founded on research too. Cross-national European research (DICE 2010) shows that (more…)

Before you start reading this post, think back a moment about your time in school: what course or subject did you like the most? Why? Which teacher comes to mind as a special one? Why was he or she so special? And what do you remember as a bad experience or teaching style, class or teacher?

Now I’d like you to keep this picture of your learning experiences (both the positive as the negative) in mind while reading the remainder of this post. Perhaps you can help me answering this question I’ve been puzzled by over the last few weeks: how does learning take place? How do we learn?

Participation and engagement in the classroom

As mentioned in my last post about the pedagogy unit I am following this term, an important influencer of the pedagogies of learning and teaching is Paolo Freire (1921-1997). He is famous for his dislike of treating students as ‘empty vessels’, “waiting to be filled by the knowledge of the teacher.” (Babbage 2004: 19). Freire calls this the “banking form of education”. Instead he advocates the process of ‘conscientização’ (consciousness-raising) “a process that emphasises the ownership of knowledge”, instead of “receiving, filling and storing the deposits” (ibidem).

What does this mean? It simply means that you don’t fall asleep in the classroom, (more…)

From September 2010, I am studying “Applied Theatre (Drama in the Community and Drama Education)” at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. The past few weeks were all about settling down in my new house and getting to know London. Since last Wednesday I am officially a student at Central, which shifted everything in a higher gear…

I told you in my first post about my motivation for this course and London. Now that the course has actually started, let me try to share some of my latest thoughts on the coming year with you.

What does my course actually look like?

My course at Central is not a regular one. For instance, my school attendance is not fulltime. This term I will only follow one weekly Friday of Pedagogies, combined with Critical Context (theory) classes on Saturdays. The guideline for fulltime students for the first term is to spend one day reading, 2-3 days at your placement and only 1-2 days at school.

The learning outcome of the pedagogy unit is (more…)