Drama Used In Other Curriculum Courses

“Drama in the context of writing with older students facilitates positive attitudes toward writing.” (Crumpler, 2005)

“One of the values of developing drama with young learners is that it engages them in thinking, doing, and imagining so that when they begin to compose texts, they weave these threads together in unexpected and interesting ways.” (Crumpler, 2005)

  

Both these quotes are from the article The Role of Educational Drama in the Composing Processes of Young Writers, by Thomas Crumpler. Crumpler is trying to portray that using drama creates a process that facilitates children in learning. It is a process that is often used by children when they are writing, but with drama it is a seamless process that the children enjoy being involved in. If children enjoy their learning they are likely to be more motivated to learn or in this articles case, write. Like Neelands, Crumpler argues that children gain a deeper understanding by doing, using their imaginations and writing “in-role.” In a drama structure children tend to imagine more and get more involved in the story at hand which in turn makes for a great written story.  Neelands would say that children can be more imaginative in drama because of tools like the drama contract, which is a safety net for kids to be creative and eliminates the fear of being wrong. In addition, drama is not teacher run, allowing children to lead the education processes together using their own experiences, resulting in a deeper and richer understanding, overall improving their writing and reading abilities. Both authors and myself feel that when a child looks back at what they learned years later, they remember something they connected with and had fun doing and this is usually a learning through a dramatic process.

Mallika Henry, in his article Drama’s Way of Learning, relates further on how students get a “richer learning experience” through drama being used in every subject. When students take on a role they create personal and imaginary worlds that provide a wealth of learning opportunities.  He bests describes this relationship by saying:

Creating personal worlds is a learning process that moves in a direction opposite to many kinds of learning, in that it begins with an idea, and analytic or abstract form of knowledge, and shapes it into contextualized knowledge. Drama creates worlds that enrich and cultivate meaning. The ‘creative act of world-making’ is a process that involves learning about both the objective world of form and the inner world of feeling. (Henry, 2000)

I believe Henry is trying to explain that through drama children can escape the typical classroom learning and begin to use their imagination to work through a learning process that best suits them coming to a more meaningful answer. I also think this quote is important as it brings up the fact that there is more than just teaching the objective, you must also have the child be aware of what is happening internally, particularly how they ‘feel.’ Henry expands on this parallel of learning by stating, “Thought is charged with feeling, while feeling is refined and strengthen by thought.” (Henry, 2000) Meaning, that thought and feeling go hand in hand and when you understand this, your thoughts will have the most powerful strength and meaning.