Online Workshop
Asynchronous Session
The Shared Breath Project: Trauma Informed Community-based Theatre Practice View Digital Media
Workshop Presentation Beverly Redman
During fall 2020, under strict social distancing and masking orders, Redman and a group of nine college students at Purdue Fort Wayne embarked together on a community-based theatre project. Using a combination of playwriting exercises, oral history documentation practices, Boal Forum Theatre and Moreno Psycho Drama techniques, they created an original theatre piece based in part on the students’ lives. This workshop presents the processes and outcomes of that work, while also teaching workshop participants some of the techniques so that they may incorporate these practices into a rage of different learning environments from elementary and secondary education to higher education and adult learning programs. The group focused on enactment of life stories, in which the student actors improvised and wrote versions of oppressor/oppressed relationships they had experienced. They gained the power to present variations on the actual events through group analysis and application of Boal and Moreno techniques that invite multiple actors to play multiple variations and resolutions. The work was eventually drafted into a written play by adding filming, transcribing, and editing techniques to the collection of activities.
Diversity in Children's Books: Intercultural Learning, Intercultural Libraries View Digital Media
Workshop Presentation Jaimy Ottevanger
Books play an important role in children’s socialisation as they provide a space for children to learn about how people treat each other. However, books available in schools often don’t reflect the cultural diversity of our society. A telling study carried out in Amsterdam, a city with 180 nationalities (compared to 150 nationalities in New York!) found that of the books available to children in participating schools, only 8% had diverse main characters (Severina, 2019). We will begin this workshop with an introduction to the work of Rudine Sims Bishop, the ‘mother’ of multicultural children’s literacy. In small groups we will briefly discuss the selection of books we are currently offering our students, and identify opportunities for creating a more diverse classroom library. We will then use a set of focus questions to analyze books that are currently popular amongst our students in more depth. Finally, we will explore extracts of recommended books and create a wishlist of books for our classrooms. By the end of this workshop participants will have: gained a new perspective on books as anti-bias tools; learned how to select diversity friendly books; and created a practical list of books that will help diversify classroom libraries.
