Saving the World with Children’s Theater
Creativity
is an escape. It can save people. It is a way to process the bad and make more
good.
–Eileen Peterson, Children’s Musical Theater Performer at
Sierra Repertory Theater
In a world of advancing technology, an
understanding and fascination with creativity is being lost to texting, video
games, and apps of all sorts. In
education, students have short attention spans, boredom with our standardized
curriculum, and a weariness to stick out from the norm or “cool” crowd. How can we introduce creativity to our
young generation and help them learn how captivating it can be? “The point of
education must be to create whole people who, through their wholeness, can
focus the accumulated wisdom of human experience into illuminated patches of
splendor” (326); I believe that this splendor can be produced through
children’s educational musicals. These musicals provide our younger generation
with a large variety of experiences that cannot be taught in a classroom.
For my project, I would like to propose
the creation of a simplified drama program for elementary age students. In particular, this program would be
tailored to 4th and 5th grade students, but could be
revisited later to include younger or older groups from this current
range. This drama program would take
place during school hours, replacing recess one day a week. It would be presented as a structured
recess, as the students are still learning, exploring, playing, and having fun
in this new-age classroom environment.
The final product of this drama program would be a short children’s
theater musical that the students act, sing, and dance in, as well as have
assisted in costume or set design/creation.
This drama program would involve art,
music, dancing, and acting. The
goal of this new program is not to produce skilled artists that are young experts
in their respective trades; it is to foster creativity and provide ample
opportunities to demonstrate its value and importance in our educational and
personal lives. Developing and
accessing this creativity at such a young age will hopefully allow these
students to learn how these tools can be applied to other classes and
activities outside of school. I
will use the creative tools presented by the Root-Bernsteins to explain how
this new drama program can help students learn and excel in all classrooms.
Perceiving
The cognitive tool of perceiving is the ability to take in
all the stimuli of an environment and respond to it honestly: taking what
appealed to our sensory network and analyzing how it was understood,
categorized, correlated, and appreciated.
In our elementary schools, we often focus on the importance of drilling
universal facts into our students: memorizing rather than integrating this new
knowledge. Students must learn to
perceive everything, and teachers too.
In an earlier project, I discussed the fascination of the Circle of Life
sequence from Disney’s The Lion King. One of the reasons that
I find this sequence so popular is because I was introduced to it when I was a
child. From
a cognitive standpoint, I could not filter what was important, make a bias
about the music, or relate it with my own experiences because I was still in
the realm of concrete thought. I
feel that perceiving is mastering this ability to purely take in all stimuli
without distraction or bias. We
need to nurture these young, flexible minds and stretch them to new potentials. Providing them with these opportunities
to explore the arts is a great first step in increasing their perception of the
world.
Patterning
Patterning is the cognitive organization of
stimuli into the most understandable logical sequence to that individual; new
discoveries can only be made with new patterns. As we learn a musical for our final performance, students
will be able to use their imagination to understand the pattern of the story
and how the characters are placed into it. Theater is a heightened
opportunity to help children realize that their imagination is the most
powerful tool they will ever have.
The theater that we create will not be silly and over-the-top nonsense,
it will be real characters with real problems. These students can learn how to imagine a fictional world
around them. It sounds ambitious,
but they do that every day when they play at recess! This is an opportunity to channel that creativity into a
final product that is fun, fresh, and useful in their ability to pattern their
perceptions of the world around them.
Abstracting
To build off the patterns that we began to
experiment with and explore, we now seek to find how these patterns fit into
larger concepts (the theme of the play, character motivations, etc.).
Abstraction is simplifying something that we know then looking at it from a
different perspective in order to learn and create more ideas about it. This is a tough concept for our young
students, but it can be taught through association with similar resources; “Creativity
then, is the process of making alterations to, and new combinations with,
pre-existing ideas and artifacts, to create something new” (Henriksen and
Mishra, pg. 2).
They have all seen The Little Mermaid and Frozen. I will ask them why they liked those
movies so much. At first, their
answers will mostly likely dwell on the visual elements, but then I will guide
them towards deeper meanings and understandings.
Patterning, usually visual, can now be expanded
to all of the senses. Only appealing to one sense is an incredibly weak
presentation of creativity, and certainly not an influential one. What did
Elsa do that made her so beloved?
What can we learn from Sebastian the
crab? When the show becomes more about the visual presentation than the story
and message of the words on the page, then it is a flop. If an actor, singer, musician, or anyone
can discover this honesty in their art through abstracting it into simpler,
larger concepts, relating it to themselves, juxtaposing it with prior
knowledge, building and learning from these concepts, creativity will come from
within – where it matters most.
Bodily
Thinking
Once
we begin to explore the new world of theater experienced through all our
senses, we can begin to feel it with our bodies through bodily thinking. Bodily thinking is the
process of expressing ourselves through actions and movements without the
interference of bias, insecurity, and doubt from our minds. It will be important for these students
to welcome these impulses felt in the body to express themselves and their
characters. What can this
physicalization teach us? These students begin to analyze how they feel in the play instead of how they look. They must empathize with
their character to truly understand his or her thoughts and actions in the
play. This is relevant to life as
well. In the difficult middle
years of schooling, physical image and being “cool” are two of the most
frequent topics on the minds of our students. They can discover the emptiness of looking good and the
wholeness of feeling good.
Modeling
Once these students discover
the importance of thinking with their bodies, it’s time to move around and
discover the workings of acting/dancing on the stage. This can be achieved through modeling. Modeling is altering the dimensions of
an imaginative idea to make it more accessible and practical for the
comprehension of future developers.
The activities that had previously been read from a script or sung by a
piano are now taken to a new environment, one that involves risks. The only way to make a better product is to take risks.
Noguchi and his idea of “emotional space” can be utilized
here. Not
only do children need to interpret and be fascinated by the theatrical elements
planned from modeling, the staging of the musical can heighten this reality;
they can transform mentally from being an audience member to living with the
characters in their fictitious world. Importantly, this is unique to the venue
of theater: “emotional space might exist on stage and around sculpture but not
in a television tube” (218). Through
this interactive drama program, students can begin to discover their emotions
and how it is healthy to express them, on and off the stage.
Play
“In play, things are whatever we want them to be” (255); children
love to play. It’s what they do best.
Play is the conscious process to make our own rules and techniques to
reach and discover the unexpected. This activity tests the imagination and
nerve to step onto a stage into front of classmates, teachers, and family
members. It is not an easy one – students have observed and imagined a new
fictitious world, recognized patterns in the discovery of these abstract concepts,
and applied bodily and dimensional thinking to efficiently present their ideas
to others (through help from teachers). And now, it is time to play. All
of these tools must be consulted to effectively play and discover something
new: “play breaks the rules of serious activity and establishes its own. Play
is frivolous, wandering according to the whims of curiosity and interest”
(248). Play, in this drama program
scenario, is structured. However we
are all still working towards the same goal – a deeper understanding and
connection of the stimuli around us.
Synthesizing
We must now use all
of these tools concurrently: “synosia is the natural and necessary result of
imaging, analogizing, modeling, playing, and transforming. Although an
individual or group must work step-by-step through a series of transformations
to define and create something new, when the process of invention is completed,
the individual or group understand the creation as a whole” (307). This drama program allows the
amalgamation of intellect and the senses: “Only through their union can
knowledge arise” –Immanuel Kant.
Not only do these pillars of learning work together, they allow us to
create new ideas in all different venues in life: “We feel what we know and we
know what we feel” (297).
A new understanding
of ourselves and how we learn arises from the use of these tools. On stage, we are able to take in all
stimuli, organize it, connect it to larger concepts, and transform it into a
creative, enjoyable product that is a creation of our own. Ironically, though it is a creation of
our own, it connects us more deeply to the world around us: “when [Nabokov’s]
senses and his sensibility suddenly intermeshed, he was flooded with a feeling
of communion between self and universe” (296).
Importance
to Education/Conclusion
Though this new drama program may
appear intimidating from the complicated process of developing creativity, we
must remember that our young students create and explore worlds and characters
of their own every day. This is merely
an opportunity to channel and focus that energy, imagination, and nerve into a
product: a children’s musical that they perform for others. Though the final product has been the
focal point of this argument, the learning process to this product will include
a variety of improvisational games and activities that will teach students to
think purely and independently: “It is clear that combinatorial
thinking cannot be forced or predicted, it must develop organically, determined
and constrained by the unique resources that the individual brings to the
creative process” (Henriksen and Mishra, pg 3). As teachers, we must change how we teach to welcome
creativity with open arms. There
are many teaching methods to try this: “to reach the widest range of minds,
ideas in every discipline should be presented in many forms. Every idea can and
should be transformed into several equivalent forms” (Root-Bernstein, 317).
The goal, though scary to accept to someone as practical as
myself, is to live in a world of the unpredictable combinations. We cannot
teach unpredictability in our world of education, but we can provide broad
foundations for our fellow learners to see the “knobs and possibilities” in
everything they create: “our task as educators is to provide learners with these
diverse experiences to help them develop these broader perspectives. The future
demands nothing less” (5). Creativity
is not about finding an answer; it is about discovering the possibilities along
the way.
2. Develop an elevator pitch
I was inspired by the elevator analogy. So I made an mp3 that you could listen to on the radio in an elevator, in the car, etc. Here is the link to the Google Drive folder with the mp3 (Module 8-Elevator Pitch):
3. Construct a message for Twitter
Hakuna
matata. A meerkat and a warthog; two of our favorite teachers. It’s time to
change our world with creativity. Join our revolution.
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