Theater+of+the+Oppressed,+Summer+2011


 * Event Title:**
 * Date: August 2011**
 * Location: Durham, NC**
 * Name(s) of Attendees: Jeremiah Rosenfels**

Description of Workshops, Classes, Institutes, Etc.:
Theater of the Oppressed (a name that turns some people off initially) comes out of the more popular Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a strand of education created by Brazilian teacher, Paulo Freire and a staple of most University teacher training programs.

Theater of the Oppressed (TO) has origins in Brazil as well and with educator and community activist, Angosto Boal, but now TO has gone world-wide. Its applications are various but generally it has two basic functions. First, it is brought to communities experiencing struggle and strife as a series of dramatic exercises meant to help individuals and groups overcome the struggles in their own or collective lives. Eventually a play is put on where the audience become “spect-actors” and are able to stop the play, take a character out, and continue the play making their own choices on how to deal with an issue. So, a five minute play can become a 2 hour interactive piece where the community can act and dialogue about the struggles (or oppression) they are dealing with in their lives. The facilitator of my training, Marc Weinblatt, told stories during the week of his experiences working around the world and the incredible things that people, usually at odds with each other, bravely worked out their issues within the setting of the workshop. Imagine this between Palestinians and Israelis!

The other obvious application is in the k-12 classroom and most of the 25 participants at my conference were classroom teachers.

In terms of the conference’s effect on me and my teaching, the week transformed me as a person, made me more conscious, more compassionate, and more driven to encourage empathy, open-mindedness, and creativity within my students. I cannot express in words the relationships that I made, and the depth and honesty that I shared with people after only a few days.

Secondly, I have already implemented TO “stuff” in my classes. The first day of school I led a sociometrics activity in the pagoda where students walked around and stood on the idea of a map on the floor, which they had to visualize and negotiate the accuracy of with each other during the lesson. Each time they moved we would share out as a class. “Where: are your ancestors from, your parents, were your born, were you for summer vacation, do you hope to live…” For World Civ I continued: “were the oldest civilizations, cultural developers of today, etc.” For Economics I asked: “are the wealthiest countries, poorest countries, most rapidly developing countries, countries with poor human rights records, with large carbon footprints, etc.” I found that by having kids actively move that the learning becomes more meaningful and memorable. The student feedback was very positive and many kids who had known a lot about each other immediately learned something new. Also, grouping individuals by likes/dislikes/language groups/religious groups/etc. can give them a better sense of what we have in common, or not.

On the first day of advisory, we played a fantastic bonding game called zip,zap,zop. Simple “ice breakers,” warmups or group bonding games were a major part of the TO training. In my first period and 6th period I have also done 30 second wake up games to get their blood flowing.

On the fourth day of school I went to the auditorium with my world civ classes and we “played” with the summer project themes of power, legitimacy, diversity, imperialism, culture…” Without going to much into detail we acted out the themes using static imagery, where one “sculptor” used 3 “pieces of clay” (other students) and formed them into historical scenes that depicted these themes. The other groups interpreted the choices of the artist/sculptor and what other ways the story could be told. What options do artists and historians have in telling history? What options do we have in representing, telling, and writing our own history?

I have many plans for implementing TO activities in both my world civ and econ classes. If you would like to hear more about them, please ask.

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