Drama at Key Stages 1 and 2

Planning for Role Play Areas

Improvising predicaments

Real experience of the playful, open-ended nature of socio-dramatic encounters is important, so ask the student teachers to select one role play area which they are prepared to develop further, e.g. a doctor's surgery, an air raid shelter, a garden centre, a castle and invite groups to improvise their way forward in this imaginary area. Additionally, the student teachers could bring resources to a session to create a mini area; this might include e.g. Second World War artefacts and textbooks or first aid equipment for an Outpatients Clinic. Such resources, if focused on cross curricular connections, can help demonstrate the scope for the application of knowledge and skills developed elsewhere.

Invite one volunteer from each group to step out of the area, select a role and re-enter the role play space as TIR in order to problematise the situation or extend the area's learning potential. This will create productive tensions for the group to manage. Each member of the group can try out TIR in this way, adopting both high status and low status roles and discussing the differences these make.

Follow up discussions will need to consider the effect of the TIR, the different status roles adopted and the potential cross curricular learning involved. Discuss this and connect it to drama across the curriculum and work using mantle of the expert. Be sure to highlight the power of the predicament and the need to retain the imaginative and the problem solving/problem finding nature of drama. Some examples of predicaments may help.