Incorporating Drama into Social Studies
One thing that I thought was really interesting was using drama strategies to teach social studies. I feel that this is something that I had never really thought of before. I knew it could be done in language. There are so many different things that can be done to incorporate language and drama. But I had never really thought about social studies and drama.
We decided to look at the book Gift Days written by the amazing Kari-Lynn Winters. I was lucky enough to have her as a professor this semester (I promise, I'm not brown nosing, I really enjoyed having her!). This is the story of a young girl in Uganda who wants nothing more than to go to school, but she cannot because young girls don't go to school, that's just the way it's always been.
We started off by looking at different statistics about why young girls do not go to school. Tradition. Tradition was the number one reason that girls are kept out of school. The fact that people just think it's not right. I thought that was absolutely insane!!!
We started reading the story and we used a number of different strategies. Two of my favourite strategies were the strategies that really got us critically thinking about the characters in this story.
One strategy we used was alter-ego. This is where one student will be the main character, and two other students will be trying to convince them of something. In this case we had someone convincing her to go to school or not to go to school. They had to pull out arguments that were presented in the book. The person playing the main character had to really think critically about the different arguments and how she and her family would be affected. She then had to make a decision. She decided that she wanted to go to school.
We also used a strategy in which we questioned the main character. It was very similar to a hot seat. We had different levels of questioning (they are on the picture, but they aren't that easy to see). The higher level the question, the more in depth it got. We had someone play the main character of the story and we started off by asking surface level questions, then moved into deeper questions.
All of the strategies that we used really encouraged critical thinking in the classroom. This is something that I feel is very appropriate for a social studies class. This is the class that is supposed to be encouraging deep thinking and questioning things that are going on in the world. These are strategies that I will be using in my classroom. I want to be able to use the arts to promote questioning and critical thinking. I think that this would be a great way to introduce some form of inquiry project as well.
We decided to look at the book Gift Days written by the amazing Kari-Lynn Winters. I was lucky enough to have her as a professor this semester (I promise, I'm not brown nosing, I really enjoyed having her!). This is the story of a young girl in Uganda who wants nothing more than to go to school, but she cannot because young girls don't go to school, that's just the way it's always been.
We started off by looking at different statistics about why young girls do not go to school. Tradition. Tradition was the number one reason that girls are kept out of school. The fact that people just think it's not right. I thought that was absolutely insane!!!
We started reading the story and we used a number of different strategies. Two of my favourite strategies were the strategies that really got us critically thinking about the characters in this story.
One strategy we used was alter-ego. This is where one student will be the main character, and two other students will be trying to convince them of something. In this case we had someone convincing her to go to school or not to go to school. They had to pull out arguments that were presented in the book. The person playing the main character had to really think critically about the different arguments and how she and her family would be affected. She then had to make a decision. She decided that she wanted to go to school.
We also used a strategy in which we questioned the main character. It was very similar to a hot seat. We had different levels of questioning (they are on the picture, but they aren't that easy to see). The higher level the question, the more in depth it got. We had someone play the main character of the story and we started off by asking surface level questions, then moved into deeper questions.
All of the strategies that we used really encouraged critical thinking in the classroom. This is something that I feel is very appropriate for a social studies class. This is the class that is supposed to be encouraging deep thinking and questioning things that are going on in the world. These are strategies that I will be using in my classroom. I want to be able to use the arts to promote questioning and critical thinking. I think that this would be a great way to introduce some form of inquiry project as well.
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