A Change of Direction

Ah well, the best laid schemes of mice and men.. and so on!

Since the last post, the meetings have continued but our original idea has not progressed much further than what has already been said and therefore there hasn't been much to write about, other than us as a group trying in vain to advance and coming up with nothing (hence the distinct lack of blog entries!). We decided that our idea was a little too indefinite in nature, especially after the feedback we gained from our presentation to the rest of the group in week 5. Bringing our idea out into the open again made us realise that it needed a rethink. The use of Multimedia in Theatre was too broad a subject to cover, our definition of multimedia wasn't clear, time constraints due to other work and individual commitments outside university, the point of the study wasn't concrete enough, in short, the list of cons outweighed the pros considerably.

And so we have instead decided that our subject area will be Theatre in Education and that we will be exploring its effectiveness as a tool for educating people of all ages. 
We hope to prove that Applied Theatre in Education can support social and academic learning through devising and performing a set of 20 minute pieces each in different styles and with different levels of interaction. The methodology of our dissertation will be based on qualitative rather than quantitative data. We hope to be able to perform to high school students or sixth form / collage students and gain feedback from them on how effective they felt the performances were. Due to ethical and legal restrictions, it may not be possible to perform to people under the age of 18. If this is the case, we will perform more advanced pieces to first year University students over the age of 18.
So that's it for now, next blog post coming very soon!

References:

Allen, John, 1979. Drama in Schools: its Theory and Practice. London: Heinmann.

Jackson, Tony. ed., 1993. Learning Through Theatre: New Perspectives on Theatre in Education. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge.

Redington, Christine, 1983. Can Theatre Teach?: An Historical and Evaluative Analysis of Theatre in Education. Oxford: Pegamon Press Ltd.