TOWARDS A CREATIVE LEARNING APPROACH: AN EXPERIMENT

Setting up of a Drama Laboratory as an integral part of the educational program.

The use of drama and theatre as pedagogical methodology is thought to be a very effective way to produce learning in small children. Therefore drama is gradually becoming an integral part of the curriculum in elementary schools. More and more schools are adopting dramatization as a mode towards learning and more often teachers are including this methodology into their annual and everyday planning. Fewer schools are using drama in a limited way : i.e. to have children perform in Christmas plays written for them by the teachers or re-interpret ready-made works, with the main aim to purely entertain parents and relatives.

Today's theatre labs in schools are more devoted to find alternative strategies to learning, where learning process is difficult or where cognitive weaknesses in children do not call for traditional deductive approaches.

Drama in the curriculum can help children

• bridge cultural gaps in multicultural communities
• make the most of differences in cognitive styles and relational styles
• help foster self-awareness and metacognitive strategies
• construct knowledge through experience and discovery

The theatre lab of XXV Aprile School aims to act above all on the cognitive weaknesses and vulnerabilities found in a number of children, as screened last year, on the following levels:

• low self-awareness
• impaired perceptual organization
• impaired motor coordination

Together with the lab devoted to "learning how to listen effectively" - which aims to provide meaningful and complex stimuli to auditory perception - the theatre lab is very much learner-centred and envisages the construction of original plays stemming from the children's personal experience. Starting from personal experiences and situations, the building of the play moves on to other people's experiences. This in order to make the children aware of the need for a mutual understanding, for a mutual acceptance of other people's point of view and therefore develop social and cooperative skills through a wide range of communicative modes.

THEATRE LAB OF XXV APRILE SCHOOL
School Year 1998/99.

Number of Children Involved: 69 in 1998

Number of Teachers Involved: 7

Time Scedule: 4 hours per week

Structure: 4 mixed groups are involved in turn with each of the activities

Activities: scriptwriting choriography scenery making singing dance