Session 8 class |V D

INTRODUCING THE GROUPS:

GROUP 1: AIR

GROUP 2: WATER


GROUP 3: EARTH

CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT ( PERSONIFICATION OF THE ELEMENTS)
Instruction card:
- Divide yourself into 3 teams, air, water and earth. (This is the first exercise we were going to do in teams.)
- Trace out any one persons body.- Give this person a name and a personality keeping your groups element in mind.( Group Air called him Mr Oxygen, Group Water called him Mr Splash, Group Earth called her Mrs Land.)- You are not allowed to write any words everything you feel and think off had to be depicted through your drawings.

- Draw out MR X's features and think of what kind of clothes he or she would wear. ( They started drawing pants and shirts, but then we made them think hes MR LAND what kind of clothes would Mr Land wear keeping in mind your elements. That's the time they started thinking. The previous exercises of drawing large and visualisations of the elements helped a lot.)
- Think of what kind of person Mr X is and express it in your drawing. ( so, they started discussing among themselves and Mrs land was calm and angry, Mr splash as playful and sometimes little sad, Mr Oxygen was clam and helpful.)
- Draw minimum 3 good and 3 bad qualities of this person. ( For the bad qualities they started to draw the problems that each element was facing.)
- Draw the surrounding this person is in.

‘..education should help one make sense of the world. At the same time, it should help students make sense of themselves as 'players' in the world.’
(Kincheloe and Steinberg 1998)

Visualisations

These Visualizations were from the initial days. I realised that first of all they were not drawing what they saw but what they thought was right and were anticipating what I want. I also realised that they were not free in their drawings so I introduced the scribbling on large paper exercises.

Session 7 Class ||| C

After speaking with Dharma last weekend I realized how important it is for the children first to scribble and use the paper for catharsis. To just let go and go wild without any structure or any fear of being graded and doing what's right to fulfill others expectations. This experience was very new to them. One of them came up to me and said " Its like feeling like a child again" :)
While I was loitering around the corridors of the school I came across the class 3 art period. I was extremely curious to know what they do in this class. I was very upset to see how this class was conducted. The teacher had drawn on the board and the children had to copy it. They were not allowed to do what they wanted to do or interpret things the way they wanted to. So I decided that in my class they can "go wild". I made them stand and draw, sit and draw, lie down and draw. At first they were very very apprehensive to do that. They didn't want to scibble. I had to play a game of "Simon says" to actually get them into the momentum and once they were free there was no looking back. Some were lying down and drawing, others were jumping with excitement. It was really refreshing to see that smile on the children's faces. Iam later going to turn their drawings into sets for our performance. Can't Wait!

Session 6 Class |V D

The session with class 4 was not something different. I repeated all the newspaper exercise with class. I also wanted to do a comparison between class 3 and class 4. Even though they are one year apart there is a vast difference in the results and the intelligence levels. I feel the class 4 kids are more serious and the responses are mature.
We started the session by first teaching how to breathe in the correct way and feeling absolutely blank and relaxed with shavaasan.
Then we started with the body - with feeling light like a bubble and your body moving with this lightness. After this I introduced the newspaper and all the creative things started pouring out.

Talk with Priya Rao, Bangalore Little Theater

Bangalore little theater is a 50 year old group that consists of passionate people coming together, without any formal training, just to have fun! As the group became bigger, so did their area of interest. One of their biggest areas of interest was training and development in experiential methodologies. So they decided to take this forward and target the base of the society - the children.
They introduced these methodologies in schools to give them a creative learning and to stimulate multi-intelligence development. Every year put up a mixed age group play and their funds go to a particular place. This year it is the Association for the Mentally Challenged.
A very good point she made was that a lot of people are doing what Iam but it has gone unnoticed because it is not structured. Most of it is intuitively done with children without any training. (They are training people to follow a structure in this field.) hence projects need to be backed up with research and facts.
She also introduced me to concepts like the Pygmalion effect - Robert Rosenthall, and enactment versus experience.

Pygmalion in the Classroom: Teacher Expectation and Pupil's Intellectual Development Book Description

When first published in 1968, (later updated in 1992), Pygmalion in the Classroom was received with almost universal acclaim for its ground breaking research. The "Pygmalion Phenomenon" is the self-fulfilling prophecy embedded in teachers' expectations. Simply put, when teachers expect students to do well and show intellectual growth, they do; when teachers do not have such expectation performance and growth are not as encouraged and may in fact be discouraged in a number of ways. Research suggests that our expectations strongly influence the performance of those around us from the members of our football team to the students in our classes. In the Oak School experiment discussed in this book teachers were led to believe that certain students, selected at random, were likely to be showing signs of a spurt in intellectual growth and development. The results were startling. At the end of the year, the students of whom the teaches had these expectations showed significantly greater gains in intellectual growth than did those in the control group.

Robert Rosenthal has contributed to Pygmalion in the Classroom: Teacher Expectation and Pupil's Intellectual Development as an author. Rob Rosenthal is Professor of Sociology at Wesleyan University. He has written widely on housing and homelessness including "Homeless in Paradise" (1994) and the use of music in social movements. He has played in bands for over forty years, including The Fuse which recorded his rock opera "Seattle 1919" in 1986.