1. Performing Arts in the Real World: Drama
Helen Champion
Webinar, 18 May 2017

2. Session overview typical learning activities
learning opportunities that are relevant and appropriately challenging
research and practice
assessment
reporting

3. Where is Drama in the Whole school, Level and Domain plans at your school?
On the timetable?
Core?
Elective?
Co-curricula?
Embedded in multidisciplinary inquiry/project-based learning?
DISCUSSION
&
SHARING
What’s happening at your school?
Why is it important to know, document and promote this information?

4. Arts curriculum design
VICTORIAN CURRICULUM: THE ARTS
Same framework for all Arts disciplines
Designed for use in multiple contexts
No set pedagogies, texts or styles

5. Victorian Curriculum: The Arts4
Strands:
explore & express/represent ideas
practices
present & perform
respond & interpret + 2
Organising ideas:
students learn as artist and as audience
Students learn by making & responding

6. What’s on the Victorian Curriculum website?
Victorian Curriculum index page
Curriculum planning resource
Navigating the website videos
Curriculum area advice

7. Is there a glossary? And what about the capabilities and cross-curriculum priorities?
The Arts landing page
In the Victorian Curriculum F–10, the Arts includes Dance, Drama, Media Arts, Music, Visual Arts and Visual Communication Design.
The Arts enable students to develop their creative and expressive capacities by learning about the different practices, disciplines and traditions that have shaped the expression of culture locally, nationally and globally. Students are both artist and audience in the Arts. They make and respond and learn to appreciate the specific ways this occurs in different disciplines.
The Arts present ideas that are dynamic and rich in tradition. Through engaging in The Arts students are entertained, challenged and provoked to respond to questions and assumptions about individual and community identity, taking into account different histories and cultures. The Arts contributes to the development of confident and creative individuals and enriches Australian society. Students express, represent and communicate ideas in contemporary, traditional and emerging arts forms. In Dance, Drama and Music students explore the performing arts whilst in Media Arts, Visual Arts and Visual Communication Design students explore the world of visual representation and expression.
The significant contributions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to Australia’s arts heritage and contemporary arts practices are explored across the Arts, and students are encouraged to respect and value these unique and evolving traditions.
Learning areas & capabilities
Koorie Cross-curricula protocols
Aboriginal languages: sample units

8. What’s ‘typical’ in Drama?
Drama knowledge, skills and understandings
Learning process: opportunities to learn mediated by prior learning and personal experiences, the school instructional model, the curriculum framework, assessment practice …
Learning outcomes: understanding self, world, communicating and challenging …

9. What’s ‘typical’ in Drama?
Starting points: themes, issues, stimulus, styles, games, practitioners, texts
Learning intentions, pedagogies, formative and summative assessment,
Explore and express ideas, practise drama, present and perform, interpret and respond
Confident and capable students with a sense of identify and capacity to communicate challenge and communicate ideas …

10. Typical starting points?
Dramatise a song
Mask drama
Sit-coms
Radio plays
Save the wetlands
Interpret a scene from a script
?????
EXPLORE & EXPRESS
PRACTICES
PRESENT & PERFORM
RESPOND & INTERPRET

11. Curriculum designed as a continuum v non-continuous student access to learning
Issues
Level v year
2 year bands
Catering for the range of experience in the classroom
Electives
Reporting
Research
Essential teaching practices
Curriculum design / Scope & sequence
EXPLORE & EXPRESS
PRACTICES
PRESENT & PERFORM
RESPOND & INTERPRET

12. F-6 in a semester? Explore and express ideas Learning activities
Explore ideas for characters and situations through dramatic play
Explore roles, characters and dramatic action in dramatic play, improvisation and process drama
Explore ideas and narrative structures through roles and situations and use empathy in their own improvisations and devised drama
Explore dramatic action, empathy and space in improvisations, play-building and scripted drama, to develop characters and situations

13. with 7-10 happening too? Explore and express ideas Learning activities
7-8
Combine the elements of drama in devised and scripted drama to explore and develop issues, ideas and themes
Develop roles and characters consistent with situation, dramatic forms and performance styles to convey status, relationships and intentions
9-10
Improvise with the elements of drama and narrative structure to develop ideas, and explore subtext to shape devised and scripted drama
Manipulate combinations of the elements of drama to develop and convey the physical and psychological aspects of roles and characters consistent with intentions in dramatic forms and performance styles

14. Planning questions
why is this activity in the learning plan for this student/group of students?
What are the key concepts the students will learn?
How will you know what students already know and what learning has occurred?
how does the activity mesh with the school instructional model ?
EXPLORE & EXPRESS
PRACTICES
PRESENT & PERFORM
RESPOND & INTERPRET

15. More planning questions
how is the activity
introduced?
taught?
aligned to prior learning?
varied to cater for different levels of knowledge and skill?
how does the activity connect to the rest of the unit/sequence?
What opportunities are there for formative assessment?
self-assessment
peer-assessment
teacher observation
EXPLORE & EXPRESS
PRACTICES
PRESENT & PERFORM
RESPOND & INTERPRET

16. Reporting Check the Guidelines Develop an approach that
Recognises how many opportunities there are to report on learning in Drama
Which level?
How will progress be shown?
Acknowledges students’ prior learning (or lack thereof)
EXPLORE & EXPRESS
PRACTICES
PRESENT & PERFORM
RESPOND & INTERPRET

17. Feedback
Please complete the survey the F-10 unit will to you so that I get your feedback about the relevance of this presentation for your work and whether it met your expectations. You can also me directly:
Helen Champion
Curriculum Manager: Performing Arts
phone: