New Stages: Challenges for Teaching the Aesthetics of Drama Online
Anderson, Michael.
The Journal of Aesthetic Education, Volume 39, Number 4, Winter
2005, pp. 119-131
The author argues that digital technologies are an important new platform (or “stage”) for teaching drama, and that we educators must embrace them. He threatens that our students are so accustomed to thinking and learning with technology that we’ll become irrelevant if we don’t incorporate it: “If drama educators cannot or will not find ways to work with technology, students will find other places to express their creativity outside the drama classroom.” (Anderson, 120) He points to a pattern of reluctance among drama teachers to expand their use of ICT’s, while students are increasingly involved in digital technologies; “much of this participation or immersion is actually in the very activities that take place in a performing arts classroom (e.g., role-based games).” (Anderson, 121) In other words, many students may be gaining fluency in some of the conventions of drama in digital contexts, and as drama teachers, we should be prepared to work with that.
Anderson is at great pains to stress that ICT’s are just tools, and the most important factor in successful classrooms is, as it always has been, good teaching. He looks at the relative readiness with which teachers of other arts have incorporated technology and asks, “how might we begin to shift our thinking as drama educators to recognize that drama happens in all sorts of media for all sorts of dramatic intentions?” (Anderson, 125), citing for example Janet Murray’s studies of games; she “defines…games as Cyberdrama if they give human participants agency, immersion, and the ability for transformation” (Anderson 127).
I can appreciate all this, and I want to find exciting ways to work with technology, but I’m afraid of compromising aesthetics or lowering the intellectual bar. I can suspend my disbelief and learn a little bit about online games, but I doubt that I’ll ever be fluent in or passionate about them enough to teach them with any intellectual rigour. Games might be helpful reference points for students when talking about character, setting, action, motivation, etc, but I’m still skeptical of them in a drama classroom, because you can be great at a computer game and not be very good with face-to-face communication. Drama is storytelling, and acting requires great fluency in real-life communication and body language to tell those stories. Maybe I just need to have my prejudice turned upside-down; or maybe I can negotiate a more suitable way to use ICT in my classroom, such as the content-rich CD-ROM’s discussed in the article.
Maybe it’s that my paradigm hasn’t shifted yet, and I still don’t have the skills to deal with these digital forms of theatre: “When digital drama becomes more commonplace, the experience and skills necessary to critically analyze that work will also grow” (Anderson 129).
Reference:
Anderson, Michael. New Stages: Challenges for Teaching the Aesthetics of Drama
Online. In The Journal of Aesthetic Education, Volume 39, Number 4, Winter
2005, pp. 119-131Accessed 18 April 2011
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