The Arts Digital Portfolio and Reflection

When I originally heard I had to do a Dance class, I sadly was very rude and insulting about the subject with my friends. This stemmed from the fact that to me and many others, you hear dance class and assume that you are teaching or learning about different dances. I also had never enjoyed dance as physical pain associated with movement, meant immediate and long term dislike. Yet I couldn't me more wrong. Dance class in schools have a bad rep, we should be calling them movement class, as they are much more focused on teaching us about movement then on just dance routines.  My instructor Debra, started our class by showing us movement cards. Each card had a type of movement like slither, hop, grow, or float, with an image and word attached. For me and many others this was a blessing as I knew vary little about my body movements other than sit, stand, walk, run, jump, etc. These gave us a starting point to grow our knowledge from. I learned in this class that we use movements ...

During the class we had to in groups come up with a lesson that integrated Drama and another Curriculum. My group created a tableau activity for the decision making model. On its own, this model can be boring for students and feel empty or pointless. We added to this idea by introducing tableau to it. Students would create a before the action, a during the action, and after the action tableau to demonstrate the process of the model. They would do this for a topic chosen by the teacher, and in our lesson we picked the health curriculum. Students would be given a scenario and have to create the tableau in reference to the different components. They would then present with the teacher tapping each student in turn and having them say a line that their character would say in that situation. For our presentation we only had time to pick the during tableau which you can see below: Here we had the class then guess what is going on and then tapped each person in turn to here what their c...

Through out the class we had many great activities that I wish to keep for my future classes. The first activity that I enjoyed was the activity were we took a new heading and acted it out as a group. It was great for figuring out different perspectives and how different people are effected by the same event. There was a short recording a of one of the group's presentation: This activity would help bring to life the topic and allow students to better understand the situation. The next activity that we did that I enjoyed was the use of tableau. Instead of acting out the entire "scene" or idea, we instead looked at the idea and picked one picture that we felt represented it. This was one we came up with: Though a frozen image our movements and actions portrayed and idea that as a class we could then break down and look at why we stood the way we did and how it conveyed the information. I loved this strategy because it really hit home how body language could commun...

When first looking at the drama class, I was unsure about its use. From my years in school I had been taught a very negative opinion on the use of drama in daily life. Yet I was quick to learn the various benefits of drama. The first class had me quickly changing my mind as our teacher Debra, showed me how in depth and useful the drama subject is. Drama is a way for students to interact and take on the personas and roles of others. They learn about walking in others shoes, how they feel, what their perspectives may be. This is so immensely useful in today's classroom. When learning about ancient peoples or trying to understand characters in a book, Drama provides a way for them to embody those people and gain a better understanding. Drama is not always about plays and scripts like I was taught when I was a kid. It is about understanding people and situations by living them out and physically experiencing them. One example from class was the usage of drama to understand a news h...