Teaching Idea

A teaching idea for our units of instruction, inspired by the Buckingham reading seems like it should come more naturally than what I’m finding to be the case. Part of that is I feel like Buckingham just reiterates what Hobbs says, but just in a different way. So I’m going to take my inspiration from Buckingham in the fact that the different facets of understanding the media she talks about are present inside the teaching idea in one way or another. Those aspects she says we ought to focus on include: production, language, representation and audiences.

Our unit of instruction is focusing on storytelling through different media. One idea I had for this would come early on in the structure of the unit. Have 5 different media bits placed in different areas of the room (this can include a two minute clip from a podcast, a 2 minute portion of a music video, a photo essay, a written creative brief, non-fiction essay and a newspaper column). Have the students get into groups around each media. Give them a few minutes to just purely encounter the media, telling the students they only need to read the media and not necessarily delve any deeper than that with this first look at it. Then after everyone has looked over their specific medium, ask them to look at it again, only this time talking to each other about what makes this medium unique from other types of media. Have them write some of their findings down on a piece of paper for the group or a group worksheet you provide (tell the students they will report their findings to the class). Have the students look at their media again and this time talk to each other about what they think the story being told is and what the message of that story is. How does this medium tell the story specifically? Who is it for? All of these things are written on the worksheet. Have the students come together and share their media and findings. After each presentation, ask the students in general this question: How is performance a part of the way this medium tells its story? I think this connection needs to be partly made because it is a theatre class and the final goal would be to get the students to create their own story told through some sort of medium with a performative element (this goes along with the idea that you’ve talked about the fact that you can construe many many different things to be performance, writing an essay is a type of performance).

This teaching idea supports the ideas of representation and language and audience. Audience is found in the question of “who is this for?” language is present as the students investigate how the story is told specifically in the medium. And representation is maybe the trickiest, but I think it is most prevalent in the asking the students how performance is present in the creation and the actual product of the medium. How does the author represent himself in the piece? How is it a performance of the author’s identity or her perception of others’ identities? Those really are the most interesting questions to me inside of a secondary theatre class. But it would require quite a bit of background knowledge