8/31/2022
Topic:
Students With Disabilities
Nancy Oukasse
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Last year I had a student with autism in my Theatre Improvisation class. He had difficulty staying on task and tended to blurt out inappropriate things at odd times during scenes. He also had difficulty focusing on the action happening on the stage. To help him learn collaboration and process the scenes he was in as well as watching, I asked him to draw the scene he was seeing, then describe it to his classmates. They were wonderful at encouraging him and asking questions about what he thought was going on in the scene. He loved to draw and it kept him involved in the scene, but with something to do while others were acting. He would sometimes want to do a scene with the actors recreating what he had processed. There were some great moments in the new scenes as he was able to pull out what the other actors either implied or ignored as they moved through their scene. It really gave him and the others a sense of the ensemble we were trying to build. |
9/7/2022
Topic:
Tools And Strategies
Nancy Oukasse
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Options 1 and 2: I teach dramatic analysis, history of theatre, acting and directing and help my students use several of the suggested strategies. One of my students with difficulty remembering the Aristotelian elements of drama in the order of importance used the Letter Strategy. For Plot, Character, Idea, Language, Music and Spectacle, she created the acronym President Clinton is Licking Monica's Stomach. Even though that was slightly inappropriate for her age, it very much stuck with both her and the abled students in the class. She was on the Spectrum and had difficulty memorizing details. By creating the acronym, she never ever missed the order of these elements and I use it to this day to help all of my students remember them. The second strategy I like to use are the guided notes. Because my high school students are preparing to study theatre in post-secondary institutions, I use guided notes to help them digest the lengthy lectures on the history of theatre, broken into relative units. One of my students had difficulty organizing his notes because he struggled with writing and needed an assisted device. He was LD and was language and speech impaired By giving him the notes with blanks as well as a word bank, he was able to follow along with the lecture and fill in the necessary material. Had I not provided this option for him, he would have not taken notes at all and would have had difficulty with the assessments as they were performance assessments showing what we had spoken about in our lectures. In this way I used technology (his laptop and a google document) for him to organize his notes. |
9/7/2022
Topic:
Assessment of Learning
Nancy Oukasse
|
Option 1 - Since my history of theatre class uses multiple forms of assessment (performance as well as written), I give opportunities for students to show their knowledge in multiple ways. One of my students with a Specific Learning Disability and Language Impairment has difficulty expressing what he knows. He is very tactile however, and uses his journal as a place to show what he knows through sketching, pasting in photos, fabric swatches and theatre related clippings and material. Instead of asking him to write a reflection, we discuss the importance of each of these items to the unit of study we are currently examining and he can connect personally to the item. Sometimes it's a bit of a stretch to get to where he needs to be with his items, but he very much looks forward to collecting his artifacts to show evidence of understanding. |