363 research outputs found
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A Sisyphean task? Doing drama online with Year 9 students in a COVID-19 lockdown
No full textUsing the allegory of Sisyphus from ancient Greek mythology, we examine the problems that arose while teaching Year 9 drama classes online during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns in Aotearoa, New Zealand. At times we have felt like Sisyphus, forced to push a boulder uphill forever. We became adept at using the school’s chosen online platform, in this case, Microsoft Teams. For all teachers, this meant that students were no longer in an actual classroom with their peers but met in a virtual space as a series of little icons on a screen. For drama, this disrupted the very essence of the praxis. Drama is, at its heart, an embodied, interactive “subject”, requiring collaboration, cooperation and participation. Like Sisyphus, we have, at times, felt the task of teaching drama cannot be truly accomplished. In this article, we focus specifically on the Year 9 drama students, the youngest year group at secondary colleges in New Zealand. They are part of the generation defined as Gen Z (Beresford Research, 2022), “digital natives who have little or no memory of the world as it existed before smartphones” (Parker & Igielnik, 2020., para. 4). We compare the expectations and interactions of a traditional drama classroom with those online. We explore the approaches we took to encourage student participation in this new forum, trying to find dramatic strategies to mitigate some of the problems that arose. We discuss the consequences and outcomes of teaching drama remotely. Unlike Sisyphus, can we learn from successes and failures, or are we as drama teachers doomed forever to roll a large rock uphill
Rethinking music technology pedagogy: A New Zealand focus
No full textIn the creative sector, "music technology" refers to a wide range of musical practices, tools and devices enabled or facilitated by computers. Yet the music technology curriculum in New Zealand, as in other parts of the world, is dominated by two specific tools: commercial Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) and notation software. In this chapter, I problematise this limitation by showing the pedagogical issues deriving from this exclusive model and by unpacking the ideological substrate of these tools, which is firmly grounded on neoliberal practices and principles. My analysis covers the ontology of these tools—what they are, what they do—and their business model. I then compare these tools against alternative approaches to music technology based on free-to-use, open-source software and programming languages based on principles of inclusion, collaboration and creative exploration
Te reo pohewa: Engaging primary-school children in writing poetry
No full textPrior to the March, 2020 COVID-19 lockdown in New Zealand I was invited to offer professional development on ways that the writing of poetry could be facilitated in a Rotorua primary school. In March/April of that year, I engaged around 18 teachers (including the school principal) in four, two-hour PD sessions using Zoom. A year on, in May 2021, I conducted a small-scale case study with teachers who had participated in all four of these sessions to find out what they had taken away from this PD. In part for my own instruction, I was interested in what “stuck” and what they saw as working in their classrooms. This article offers a brief overview of the shape of the PD that was offered and teachers’ views on its impact one year on
Performing empathy: Using theatrical traditions in teacher professional learning
No full textThe challenge of learning to be a teacher in a pandemic stymied world calls for focus and access to pedagogies of critical empathy to ensure the wellbeing of students is paramount in classrooms K to 12. Additional to facilitating the development of skills and competencies in curriculum disciplines, teachers are required to meet the emotional and social needs of their learners and prepare them to be active citizens in an increasingly complex and chaotic world. Making certain all students in their care are nurtured in environments that establish emotional safety and growth is a central tenet in the practice of all good teaching. Empathy, it seems is at the forefront of our western thinking given its prevalence in common parlance and language. Superficially, this is no bad thing. Kindness, being more humane, thinking of others and reflection, are all arguably positive attributions or ways to behave to better and create a more humane society. However, empathy needs to be activated conceptually in productive and transformational ways, to be defined, problematised and critiqued. Grounding this work in the affordances of drama rich pedagogies (Ewing, 2019) and by drawing on the work of Maxine Greene (1995) and Stanislavski (1936), this article argues that creating a coherent and empathic classroom requires a praxis of critical empathy, facilitated by careful attendance to methods and processes steeped in and informed by theatrical traditions. In addition to a theoretical and contextual positioning of the work, this article will elucidate the method of practice undertaken in a research project, developed to inform the practice of teachers and educators
An introduction to the third special issue in our special series: The Arts in the classroom: Advocacy, theory and practice
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New Zealand’s refreshed curriculum: Another promise unfulfilled?
No full textArt disciplines such as music have continued to be marginalised in the curriculum, due to educational policies such as National Standards that have focused solely on numeracy and literacy. With growing concerns of a narrowing curriculum, there have been several developments in education, including the removal of National Standards in 2017, the introduction of the Creatives in Schools programme and a refresh of New Zealand’s national curriculum. Despite this, minimal resources continue to be allocated to primary music education, with the subject remaining underfunded and under resourced
Interconnectedness, intergenerational interactions and improvisation: Critical aspects of curriculum advancement in the Arts
No full textIn 2021 Professor Papaarangi Reid, at The University of Melbourne, shared the ancient proverb “I ngā rā o mua”, translated to mean “before we know where we are going, we must know where we have come from”. This proverb sets the tone for discussing the Arts in the New Zealand curriculum, as during radical upheaval and social change as being experienced in the pandemic, we are forced to examine activities to reflect and discover anew the road ahead (Lindley, et al., 2021; Wood, et al., 2021). This is a critical inflection point for redefining the future of New Zealand Arts Education, as it coincides with the current New Zealand Curriculum (Ministry of Education [MoE], 2007) refresh (MoE, 2021). This research informed paper advocates for mātauranga Māori and te ao Māori in the Arts curriculum to ensure distinctive, bold transformational learning opportunities are experienced by learners within the education system. This article suggests the values of interconnectedness, intergenerational purpose and improvisation can dismantle disciplinary boundaries and offer a critical frame to reconsider a forward-focused Arts curriculum