Support International Arts Education Week May 25-31 2020

Each year the last week of May is declared UNESCO International Arts Education Week.

It is an opportunity to advocate for arts education in all its diversity. 

The WAAE World Alliance for Arts Education (FaceBook) has again promoted International Arts Education Week with poster, events and webinars.  

Check out the following sent by UNESCO.

Watch this promotional video from UNESCO

Watch this Video Message from the UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Culture

Read this UNESCO Director-General's statement

Message from Audrey Azoulay, Director-General of UNESCO, on the occasion of International Arts Education Week 25 – 31 May 2020 

International Arts Education Week is an opportunity to promote learning with and through the arts to improve the quality and relevance of our education systems, nurture creative thinking and resilience. 

UNESCO – as the only United Nations agency with a core mandate encompassing culture, heritage, arts, creativity and education – is committed to joining forces with its Member States to step up cooperation, mobilizing civil society, educators and arts professionals to fully harness the potential of both culture and education.

On this day, I call upon everyone to join us in celebrating International Arts Education Week, so we can make this disaster into flowers, to offer to the  world. 

IDEA the International Drama/Theatre and Education Association is celebrating International Arts Education Week in collaboration with WAAE. You can find out more information on the IDEA web page (FaceBook: https://www.facebook.com/IDEA.DRAMA and https://www.facebook.com/robin.pascoe.391) 

Ring the Bell for Arts Education

Sanja Krsmanovic Tasic from CEDEUM in Serbia amplified an idea from Tintti Karppinen from FIDEA in Finland challenged us all to ring the bell for arts education - to create a flash mob event of bell ringers. 

IDEA Webinar 1 May 30 – Reviving the Soul of the Seoul Agenda on Arts Education

 The other initiative of IDEA is to organise its first Webinar - as part of a larger strategy responding to the current Pandemic and the cancellation of the IDEA2020 Congress. 

You can still register for this webinar at https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_hMZdJH1AR_qDioGjpjkxoQ  

 IDEA is looking forward to further webinars to bring together the worldwide membership of drama educators. And there’s more

For example, The Canadian Network for Arts & Learning made A Call to Action on Arts Education

“The Canadian Network for Arts & Learning calls on governments, artists, educators, professional organizations, researchers, universities, communities, and all advocates of arts and learning to endorse the following principles to ensure that the arts are positioned to make an increased and sustainable contribution to learning both at school and throughout our communities.

To kick off International Arts Education Week, they are  officially launching an endorsement campaign for our Call to Action on Arts Education. COVID-19 has devastated the arts and learning sector, threatening to push the arts completely out of post-pandemic school programming while limiting the impact of the sector on broader community revival. Your endorsement will help our advocacy efforts as we seek to sustain and grow arts and learning in an emerging new normal. By adding your name, you will make a bold statement that arts and creativity are integral to the learning process, both at school and throughout life, and are fundamental to the development of the fully realized individual.”

Devising Performance through Process Drama

After a workshop in Zhuji at IDEA IDEC Regional Drama Education Conference, introducing participants to using process drama strategies to teach drama, I received an email from one of them: I understand how you might use process drama strategies as one-off activities or lessons. but how does that help me meet the expectations of my school and parents for a performance as a result of the drama classes?

What is Process Drama?

Process Drama is a method of teaching and learning drama where both the students and teacher are working in and out of role (definition from the Australian Curriculum: The Arts, https://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/f-10-curriculum/the-arts/Glossary/?term=process+drama.

Process Drama is a term coined by John O’Toole, Cecily O’Neill and others to describe contemporary dramatic explorations – most often in an educational setting – based on extended connected improvisations and structured through a sense of theatre and drama structures and traditions.

Initiated through a powerful pre-text process drama, like improvisation, creates a “dramatic elsewhere”, a fictional world but one that is inhabited for insights, interpretations and understanding of participants rather than audiences.”

Excerpt From: Robin and Hannah Pascoe. “Drama and Theatre Key Terms and Concepts.” iBooks.

Why is it a powerful way of learning drama?

Process Drama is a way of helping students know and learn drama by participating in drama processes themselves – by embodying drama through engaging their thinking, emotions and physical selves. It is one powerful way of students learning in practical ways the Elements of Drama, the Principles of Story, the skills and processes of drama performance and production.

In Process Drama teachers and students use a range of drama learning and teaching strategies such as Role on the Wall, Hot seating, etc. They are tools, fundamental building blocks that help students understand how we can create, first of all, moments of drama. They then learn how to craft those moments into dramatic sentences and paragraphs and shape them into a devised performance involving scripting, rehearsing and sharing for an audience. You can find more about Drama Learning and Teaching Strategies in Learning Drama Teaching Drama (Pascoe and Pascoe 2014).

Devising using process drama is a more complex drama strategy. It is sometimes called Play Building.

In overview, a teacher can develop a term or semester long program involving:

You can find more about devising and play building in Building Plays Simple playbuilding techniques at work (Tarlington and Michaels 1995)

Bibliography

Pascoe, R. and H. Pascoe (2014). Drama and Theatre: Key Terms and Concepts (3rd Edition). Perth, StagePage.

Tarlington, C. and W. Michaels (1995). Building Plays Simple playbuilding techniques at work. Markham, Ontario, Canada, Pembroke Publishers/Heinemann.