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I felt very included in the first seminar of the unit, and found many students were open to communication and ideas after some initial apprehension. The most important point brought across through the tableaux activity was the concept that effective arts education engages student’s creativity compared to evaluating the effectiveness they have of following instructions. I find this important in that when we are teaching, we are preparing people, and people are more than instruction followers. In my reflection on my own philosophy, I saw it as building people to be able to tackle many and vastly differentiated problems, therefore activities that promote the development of creative skills through drama I saw great value in.

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This week during readers theatre I had myself and another group member comment that because the activity was very social and small group focused, that it eliminated a lot of nerves. The critical component I believe is that the activity could be a very effective way to engage students that lack self confidence in speaking. I believe it is important to engage in a variety of oral presentation because the increasing accessibility to present and share ourselves in video format grows continuously with time. I believe it is important to tactically use readers theatre to engage students that are less speaking confident, as the task was very good at preventing anxiety I typically notice while doing that kind of task.

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The concept that students learn by symbolizing their world through drama means that the same ideas can be communicated by different students depending on their contexts. For this week we performed elements of mime, and this is a way students who prefer to communicate non-verbally can express themselves. If I asked a student to mime “a school day” some might physically mime the outline of their desk, other would mime school related actions like writing or reading, another might mime out talking to their teacher or friends. Students all see school in a different context and thus use different symbols of school to communicate that idea. The important concept I found is that this provides an opportunity for students to reflect on why they chose to use their specific actions to represent what they did.

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This week was the partner talks assessment, a specific element we focused on that Arts allow for additional forms of knowledge to be appreciated and built that is normally unavailable in other subjects. The condensed version is that regular schooling has largely a content focus, whereas arts has the opportunity to foster creativity, identity, expression and an appreciation of the reason we value things. The important element that this concept I draw in on is the final one that being the arts ability to get us to reflect on ourselves. School can be a very busy time and I certainly felt when I was younger that I was learning things for reasons I didn’t understand. I believe that the arts allows us to find a way to present these reasons better than others.

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Dance has revealed to me that there is a great extent of information in body movement that I had not noticed until I started paying attention to it . my important realisation is that I had not realised the subtle things I do when I am feeling excited or nervous until I consciously tried to emulate them through dance. This is important as it provides a framework for myself to help understand the impressions, I may give to others unconsciously and how students could benefit from similar self-evaluation.

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During the lesson activity called the blob I noticed that there was a large amount of discoordination that resulted in the ‘blob’ expanding out into a line a lot. My important realisation is that one skill that can be effectively scaffolded in arts is effective team communication using a variety of methods, because afterwards there were numerous ways, I could think of to aid communication such as designating a blob centre that all others work around or developing hand signals to bunch up or spread out. This is important as collaborative learning often prioritises the ideation and division of workload as a team and teamwork skills are developed alongside them. The Arts allows the specific focusing on the development of those skills.

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This week we had a dance devised on our birthdays from numbered dance moves. I noticed that within categories of movement like ‘leap’ almost every student had a subtly different movement, for example landing on one foot or two, transitioning into a roll, or leaping backwards or forwards. This was a case that demonstrated the expressive capability of dance and how creativity can be scaffolded. From a simple one-word prompt came forth a number of distinct expressive movements. From the simple scaffold of a series of numbered, single word movements everyone in the class developed different dances and all of them were iterated upon in the lesson, therefore the scaffold acted as a effective platform that each participant creatively pursued in different ways.

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This week an aspect the unit was the rule of thirds the principle that images are composed on the principle that it should be divided into 9 equal parts to improve composition. The important element I noticed on reflection was the fact that I could see this principle in action in various forms of media I had previously seen but had never noticed before. I believe this is important in demonstrating how education of media arts technical codes can cause people to revaluate and recontextualise previous life experiences. I previously never noticed the rule of thirds but after learning about it , I could notice it frequently, therefore the arts can encourage a greater element of reflection and consideration of one’s past experiences.

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This week was our group performance with our given colour being green. Our performance was themed on recycling and consisted of a person who didn’t care about recycling being shown visions of the past, present and future by the Spirit of Recycling to change his ways. Overall, I believe I found the concept of a group performance based on a simple idea would be a fantastic activity to adapt for a classroom. For classroom purposes it could be changed into only using dance, drama, or media arts or kept as is depending on the time allotted. Specifically, the reason I believe the activity is useful as it incorporates slightly scaffolded creative thinking as well as collaborative learning.