My question 'how do teachers incorporate arts within the classroom?'
From my interview with participant A, who has a background in the acting industry, I was left feeling energised and inspired. It was obvious she used many of her acting skills within her lessons and referred to the "kids like an ensemble". She talked about a recent science lesson she planned involving an experiment "the science experiment as theatre". She talked through the stages of the lesson, the introduction , the experiment and the writing up. Through how she explained I got the impression she used acting skills, a range of voices and characters to engage the children. The lesson described recalled a video (TEDx talks, 2015) I recently watched in which Ben Richards talks about why 'teachers teach but kids don't learn'. Ben Richards is 'an award winning playwright, an experienced teacher of drama, philosophy and mathematics.' He used an example of a way of engaging the children in learning through the use of puppets in a maths lesson. It seemed the effect of using the puppets made the problem more relatable to children, they where intrigued by the puppets which got an initial reaction and they wanted to help the puppets solve the maths problem. Similar to the results of participants A lesson where she said 'children where engaged' and used the case study of one child. 'This child is one that usually hates school, doesn't want to join in with lessons, but in that session he was actively involved, he expressed excitement and he wanted to write up the experiment'. From this case study it led me to believe that the as a result the lesson involved all students and was more inclusive. In relation to my practice I can see the benefits of incorporating your acting skills within the classroom, it makes it more engaging for a child and leading me to question should teachers have arts training? The background of both participant A and Richards is the arts- does a background in arts make a more effective teacher?
TEDx Talks (2015) Why teachers teach but kids don't learn. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKo69os94cU Accessed: 1st October 2017.
Great idea to do a pilot type approach to thinking about what was said.
ReplyDeleteHere are some thoughts. Participants are people in your study - in that the humanity of them is part the study (what do they do). They are not test-tube s(test tube A, test tube B). So because they are people give them names (new names). It is easer for us to remember who is who and it gives us more of a sense of them as people talking about their lives.
Yes, this is exactly the type of reflection you should write after an interview to help you start to notice themes and connections - you have made the connection with Ben Richards work and there is a theme emerging about engagement.
For this post I think you should remove the quote because here there is no anonymity (which there needs to be) as the quote mentions about someone other than who was in the Skype call.
Well done.
So now leave the 'topic' alone and start to think about the art of making planning. Detail like what your relationship with the participants is (they are people) so how you will refer to them. Or the type of interview you will hold. etc... should now be your focus to avoid just doing more and more about finding out about the topic itself. These planning points are important because the approach you take needs to be considered there are many ways to research so make sure you have made choosen not just designed something without thinking about what it means to do it that way.
Great work keep going.
Thankyou for the feedback Adesola. It was a good way to try out analysing some research and made me think about whether it is best to use quantitive and ablative data.
ReplyDeleteI plan to now look at developing my proposal and research methodology.