Theater in Education

Recently a chance was given to me by my organisation to meet an eminent theatre’s artist of my city. To my surprise I found the interaction very knowledgeable and concrete as I realised that how theater activities can instill practical or real learning in kids.

Normally we give stimulus to students increase their retention powers in the form of repetition, fear, assessment and many more but without realising that we are hard on tender minds. Theater serve the purpose of easy learning and fun learning without making child feel burdened with curriculum. For instance the teacher will first narrate the story of thirsty crow to kids and than tell them to enact it without dialogues. Kids produce an exceptionally good act. Later they were told to give human voice to crow and show his feelings for the situation with dialogues without giving the written dialogues to the kids. The KIDS PRODUCED AGAIN A MASTERPIECE BY MAKING THEIR OWN DIALOGUES AT THE SPOT AND SPONTANEOUSLY.

The crux is that how without pressure of curriculum one can make children learn things and that to be imbibed in actual life with all its morale, ethical, academic, kin aesthetic, emotional, scholastic and co-scholastic values.

I think education need to be multidimensional. Educators need to be innovative and creative with their teachings so that education can become a part of their existence.

Theater is one such area where teacher with their access can bring forth change in monotonous and hard ways of learning to fun filled and enjoyable ways of learning.

Sangeeta Chaudhary