Rehearsing for Justice: Developing Role Plays for the Classroom

Dear Portland Area Rethinking Schools friends,

This April, I'll be teaching a class at Lewis and Clark College on writing role plays: Rehearsing for Justice: Developing Role Plays for the Classroom, http://www.lclark.edu/dept/ccps/rehearsing.html. Please consider enrolling in the class and/or passing this along to colleagues you think might appreciate knowing about it. We'll be exploring all kinds of role plays -- "tea parties," simulations, improvisations, single- and multi-group role plays, trials -- and dissecting what makes a good one and then working on developing one of our own. The class will meet four Saturday mornings, April 4-April 25. New teachers, veteran teachers -- everyone welcome.

If you have questions or want to talk further, please email me at bbpdx@aol.com, and I'll get back to you. Details from the catalog description below.

Best, Bill

Bill Bigelow
Rethinking Schools
www.rethinkingschools.org

Rehearsing for Justice: Developing Role Plays for the Classroom

Course Description:

Role plays help bring the curriculum to life for students. They engage, they challenge, they pose questions. Role plays can help students learn about social dynamics from the inside, through exercising their "empathic imaginations." They can help students come to see the world not as something that simply happened, but as something that is made by human beings. Role plays can help us develop a curriculum of choices, that suggests to students that their decisions and actions matter. Role plays are also a more democratic pedagogy because they can simultaneously challenge those students traditionally regarded as "high achievers" as well as those labeled "slow learners."

In this class we will explore a variety of role plays: "tea parties," simulations, improvisations, and multiple-group role plays. We will evaluate the way in which different role plays lend themselves to different subjects and different insights about society. A key component of the course will be participants developing and writing their own role plays. The course would be appropriate for teachers at any point in their career. Although the instructor is a social studies teacher, the class would be valuable for any teacher hoping to incorporate role play into one's curriculum.

Dates: Saturdays, April 4 through April 25
Times: 9 am to 1 pm
http://www.lclark.edu/dept/ccps/rehearsing.html