Questioning What We See
Posted February 24th, 2009 by Anya Hankin, Teacher.
Week three of What Do You See. In many ways our packed afternoons in Ms. Jo Lane’s theatre classroom have seemed to fly by. In many ways it feels like are only just getting to know one another, to be fully at home in the process. I feel lucky that we still have so many hours, so many weeks and months left to explore the incredible creativity unfurling in the classroom.
Standing in a circle, as we do every day at the start of the session, a student begins a round of “Popcorn” a warm-up game designed to establish focus in the group. He makes eye contact with the student to his right, and sends a domino of claps around the room; each student clapping in unison with their neighbor and then passing the movement to the person on their right. Some days, the energy is palpable and the room quiet, save for the rhythm of our claps. Other afternoons, the wave of claps barely makes it past the first few students before we are interrupted by giggling and chit-chatting. We are all still getting to know one another, making sure that the atmosphere is safe, but we have all begun taking little risks and challenging ourselves.
This week we jumped into the task of really questioning “what we see” and what we think others see when they look at us. Students were asked to describe their face in as much detail as possible, as if they were meeting someone for the first time. Their vivid verbal illustrations of a “zit on the tip of my nose” and “shoulder length frizzy brown curls” and “eyebrows like caterpillars” enabled their classmates to correctly (and excitedly) pinpoint who they were.
Next week we delve more deeply into this exploration as Kaiser Permanente presents a unit on Media Analysis and students share monologues that they’ve written about their oldest living relative. As the weeks progress, answers are emerging as to the nature of our show and the vital issues the students want to address, but mostly, we are relishing in the wealth of questions that materialize, both from the students and the teaching staff.