Process and Practice in Education

Kid Politics: This American Life

Spending a Day with the Roma

Process Drama and Multiple Literacies

What hard choices have you had to make?

Do you:  Go with your gut reaction? Weigh the pros & cons, and come to a decision you can back up and justify? Do you follow what your friends/family/confidants say &/or do, without question?  Do you go against what you believe due to outside pressure?

On my way home from a great Interactive Theater workshop in NYC, I turned on the local NPR station (WNYC 93.9 FM). The program This American Life was on, and just in time: I had been hearing the teasers for the program and was hoping to catch it. A group of 5th graders (ten/eleven years old) were undergoing an amazing Process Drama:

“What if, say, the U.S.-led invasion of Grenada in 1983 had been decided, not by Ronald Reagan, but by a bunch of middle-schoolers?”

The students were led on an amazingly detailed program. Three rooms were set up for them: a press room, a command center, and the President’s office/war room. Split into three groups, the students were in role, being asked to make the hard decisions that adults with “experience” in these matters had struggled with almost thirty years ago.

I don’t want to spoil it for you. I included the link above (first one) so you can listen to the program (there are two other “acts”: one with a 14 year old discussing Global Climate changes and a school in Brooklyn that is governed by…the students). I hope after you listen you’ll come back here and leave some comments.

The second link is from the blog Woman Wielding Words about an amazing experience with practicing drama with kids from a very different culture.

The third link: really, the nuts and bolts of what I love to do with students: have them make personal discoveries and to think for themselves. Weigh it all out, find out what they feel is right or wrong, and then also look at how someone else see’s the same situation; How it is sometimes hard to make a decision at all.

There are applications for Arts in Education in all core curricula, as there is in Art in all aspects of life. That is part of what creativity comes into play.