This week we did a practice Edcamp, in which a small group of colleagues and I essentially brainstormed ways to engage students in cross-curricular learning. The idea that intrigued me most was the possibility of merging theatre, specifically Theatre of the Oppressed workshops, with virtually any other subject.
I have extensive experience with Theatre of the Oppressed as an actor. In this format, actors perform scenes in front of an audience of learners. In each scene, something goes significantly wrong. After performing it once, the actors repeat the scene, but with audience members having the option of yelling “STOP” to pause the scene, then replacing one of the actors and doin things differently to fix what went wrong. After that, the director leads a brief discussion of the person’s change to the scene and how it worked or didn’t, and they do the scene a few more times to allow other audience members to suggest other remedies.
As an example, I have created a Theatre of the Oppressed scene to teach about experimental design in science. See If you can come up with anything that could be done better!