This past Monday 20 teachers met at the O’Donaghue Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance to take part in Baboró’s five-day-long CPD course on drama tools for the classroom. Some of the participants came with extensive backgrounds in the arts while others came with little to no drama experience at all. However, all of the educators joined together to deepen their understanding of how to utilise drama in the classroom, both as a subject in itself as well as a methodology through which to teach other primary school subjects.
Under the direction of Irene O’Meara, a Drama specialist and primary school teacher, these teachers participated in a week of hands on drama games, tools, and activities. They experimented with improvisation, mime, song and dance, and various other drama techniques that could be employed in the classroom as a means of exposing children to theatre or teaching other subjects through a creative, hands-on framework. Exploring how to use drama’s fictional lens in the classroom to safely explore a wide array of important emotions, issues, and themes, educators were able to leave equipped with an entirely new and exciting set of tools for their classrooms.
Baboró was thrilled to see how positively the teachers responded to this course and cannot wait to see the ways in which it inspires educators to bring the creative arts into the classroom!
The experience was wonderful and exhausting! I didn’t expect to invest so much in it! It was fantastic. You go from joy, to sadness, to anger to happiness. It encompassed so many emotions and feelings…. I found myself doing things I wouldn’t normally do, like singing. It was great!
It has been a very intensive week but really enriching and enjoyable.
One of the best facilitators I’ve ever encountered.
It was so much fun, we dug so deep. This week will stay with me forever.
