On Jan 25, 2011, Naomi and I started our new year with the workshop Beyond the Apple: Acting for Equitable and Inclusive Teaching Practice by working with a class of teaching candidates at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) of the University of Toronto.
Larry Swartz, instructor at the pre-service elementary program invited us to his class. Please see Larry's credentials http://code.on.ca/honorary-members. Working with the students was a pleasure as they welcomed us into their afternoon session. We delved right into identifying and exploring issues and challenges standing in the way of making their teaching practice equitable and inclusive. Naomi and I were curious what the issues will be. The students already had their first practicum (student teaching) experience behind them and thus the issues we explored were real for them; they ranged from classroom management, witnessing bullying among students, and difficult colleagues to systemic discrimination. These issues all impacted equity they all thrive to uphold in their classroom/school environments.
In our workshop, we use Forum Theatre techniques to support the analysis and understanding of these challenges and issues. We structured the workshop so that the participants in small groups developed their issues into short scenes, which they then presented back to the other groups. Under our guidance, the participants stopped and analyzed the scenes and rehearsed alternative course of actions and outcomes by stepping into the shoes of the protagonists and making different choices - intervening. In Forum Theatre, we always explore so called anti-model, i.e. a situation, which is the worst case scenario and through the interventions, we are looking for alternative solutions and better outcomes for the protagonist. All students identified that the opportunity to talk about things that went wrong or were very difficult to handle was the main asset of our workshop. For many, our workshop offered healing and insightful moments.
The feedback comments we received were overwhelmingly positive - a great start of a workshop series for us. Also, Larry commented after the workshop in his thanks you email: "thanks to you both for a terrific workshop.. i'm sure the feedback strongly supported your work. your work is terrific".
Looking forward to carrying this exciting work with other teaching candidates as well as offering it to teachers in the GTA school boards as their Professional Development experiential workshop.
No comments:
Post a Comment