Teaching Theatre Appreciation

Video Transcript

"Hi this is Laura Turner and today I'm going to talk to you about how to teach theatre appreciation. The first thing that you want to remember about teaching theatre appreciation is that you are probably going to be teaching students who may have never been to the theatre before. So the first thing you want to do whenever you are teaching this class is to actually sit down with the students the first day and find out who they are, where they've come from and if they have seen any theatre or not. And actually figure out you know what their experiences are with theatre now. Next I would strongly advise that if you can you should actually have the students go and see live productions of plays. Because really the only way to teach anything is to show and to learn by doing. So let the students go see plays and come back and then talk about plays with you rather then just talking about plays as you read them or just referring to them. Next have your students compare live theatre with other forms of entertainment that they have seen, like film, sort of take this opportunity to introduce them to the new form and let them explore what it can mean and what it can do. And finally teach the students about the basics, go from acting to directing to lighting to set design, costuming and stage management. Don't leave anything out because these people actually might want to do this in some capacity and they need to know about all of the aspects of putting together a production. Give the students a sense of why theatre is important to the world in which they live and also even try to go so far as to make the class even more interesting and have the students actually stage a very small production of their own at the end of the class. And those are just some ideas for teaching theatre appreciation."