The Thinking Skills of Theatre
Comments(2) As I read chapter four of the text, I was constantly trying to relate the information to my content area—theatre. I was trying to analyze which of the “thinking skills” that were deemed as necessary for other subjects also pertained to my own.
The subject of the first section is language arts and its skills are broken down into “interpretation, persuasion, and figuring out causes and effects” (71). All of these apply to theatre. In analysing the plots, themes and characters in a piece of theatre the skills of interpretation and figuring out cause and effect are paramount. Therefore, I found the examples of academic expressions in relation to these areas to be particularly helpful. For instance, when a student is studying Othello they may say that he was “angry” and that is why he kills Desdemona. I could scaffold this by saying “So Othello was motivated to kill Desdemona by anger? What was he angry about? What other words could we use to replace “anger”…how about jealousy or “he felt betrayed”? What caused Othello to feel betrayed?” etc. Understanding a character’s motivation to act in a certain way is crucial to the art of acting. Therefore, the scaffolding methods addressed in the text will be very helpful, not only in helping to build academic language, but also in helping the actor to specify his objectives in a scene.
The skills of persuasion are also helpful in theatre class, as students often must write reviews or critiques of productions. They must be able to explain why they hold a certain opinion by providing convincing arguments and displaying relevant evidence. Consequently, the advice from the text of how to express opinions in a persuasive way is also important for the study of theatre.
As I continued to read, I found more relationships to other content areas, such as history, that share their set of necessary skills with theatre. Overall, I found that this was a very practical and helpful reading in which I found much that is of worth for the teaching of theatre and the building of academic language.
Melanie Reich
Melanie I really enjoyed reading your post, and thought you brought up a lot of great points about mixing disciplines and this being helpful for ELL’s. While you focused on bringing Language Arts into Theatre, I would be flipping this around. As an English teacher I hope to bring drama and theatre into my class, and your post really helped me realize that not only would this be dynamic and interesting for the class, but also very helpful for ELL’s.
Using your example of Othello, and the idea of having students better understand character reactions and motivations, while you might prompt your students through language, in an English class, after we had already read the play and talked about the language, I might have the class watch a clip of an adaptation. My thoughts are that for ELL’s who already know the emotion of anger and jealousy in their first language, but are perhaps less sure of it in English, seeing it acted out and reading the body language and facial expressions of an actor might help firm up their understanding. I think body language and cues like it are somewhat universal, and seeing a physical portrayal of language would serve to help communicate many aspects of it, especially anything abstract, if possible.
We are, understandably, split up into our content areas for some of our time in this program. However, I think chapter 4 from Zwiers, as well as LLED 360 itself are essential in proving that the perspectives from other areas can be quite beneficial to all students in our future classes, and are not as separate as they may seem.
Like Melanie, I had to make connections in the Chapter “Content Area Variations of Academic Language” from disciplines like Social Studies and English to understand how ELL’s may struggle in Art class. Like the study of theatre, and language arts, students need to be able to persuade their audience with their images. In art, students need to understand this type of persuasion so they can engage viewers in their art work and also defend their point of view in a critique of their art work. As an art teacher it will be my job to support students in building their persuasive language to do this effectively. In history the skills of understanding interpretation and perspective taking are also important in art. When studying an image, students need to be able to connect to historical events, art history and current events to understand it. Some of this understanding can be very culture specific. I will need to assume that my students do not have this deep knowledge as an ELL and will have to provide some context for my students when studying complicated images. Further in this issues is perspective taking, I now know that sensitivity is necessary when asking students to discuss their opinions on certain issues because their cultural upbringing may prevent them from being comfortable doing this. I know that with practice the type of language I use to scaffold students’ language development will come easily.