The SWiSS students were very pleased to have as our guest in our English drama class Dr Prue Wales, Assistant Professor of the Visual and Performing Arts Group at the National Institute of Education, and she was very impressed with how our students had shown their mettle when tackling the issue of a caning policy in schools (which Telok Kurau does not practice), and came up through their dramatizations of their comprehension passage some insightful alternatives to caning as a disciplinary measure and deterrent.
As an exploration of one of the elements of drama, our students were also encouraged to reflect on the issue of status and power of characters within their dramatization, and how they would use positions, props and voice to project that difference in status. Akmal and Shaffy from 2T1 managed to convey this successfully in their leadership of their different groups, and their freezeframes that they enacted at the beginning of their scene helped the audience to clearly identify who was in power and what were the dramatic conventions used e.g. position, props etc.
All in all our students surpassed our expectations in demonstrating an insightful peek into the mind of a SWiSS student and how they viewed the issue of discipline, the system of punishments and more importantly the concept of Accountability for their actions (they all agreed through their dramatization that a wayward student did deserve punishment for the wrongdoing), however they showed insight into the importance of differentiated punishments for different roles played by a group or gang in the same incident – which indicated to the teachers the maturity of their thought processes and an inclination towards prioritizing fairness and justice in the meting out of the punishment – not just punishment for punishment’s sake.
This was indeed an interesting discovery, and the use of drama to sieve out this thought process and make the weighing of issues real and relevant for them made it easier for them to understand and engage with the comprehension passage given to them.
The next follow-up lesson entailed a reflection piece from each student in role: If they were the principal of a school, would they institute a caning policy, and why?
During the writing exercise, the class was pin-drop silent with only the scrabbling sound of pen flying across paper to be heard in the stillness of the BlackBox. But this was no oppressive and meek silence of the usual NT students who were being disciplined and threatened into quiet docility – this was one of concentration and focus on their task, where students are highly engaged with the topic and asking insightful and intelligent questions to move their reflection along. Students like Shaffy and Hazrin were also asking questions about spelling, grammar, technical language skills that they realized they now needed in order to express themselves properly and clearly now that they had something worth saying and that came from their own personal weighing of the issue.
The SWiSS teachers were very proud of the progress in learning processes of our students that we saw unfolding in the classroom as a direct result of an increased investment and ownership in their task due to the conventions of process drama being used as a platform to increase engagement and oracy levels. We here at the SWiSS school are confident that this will lead to better results in the future.
Well done, SWiSS students!
Let’s keep on showing them how its done :)
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