The Department of Early Childhood Education (ECE) organized a knowledge exchange seminar in March 2019. During the seminar, Dr. Pansy Tam, Assistant Professor of ECE, shared her experience of promoting “drama-in-education” in Hong Kong.
Dr. Tam emphasized that “drama-in-education” is highly “inclusive”—children with various backgrounds and different strengths are all working together, using not only their verbal abilities and intellectual skills, but also their emotional resources and gross motor skills, to create and recreate a story framework. Moreover, “drama-in-education” does not focus on the outcome, or the overall stage performance. It is the process, or how children collaborate and negotiate with one another to construct meanings and symbolise ideas, that really matters.
Dr. Tam used her own project as an illustrative example. In her project, kindergarten teachers adapted the story “Three Little Pigs,” encouraging children to design their own house and play the little pigs. The teachers then jumped into the scene, as the “villain” of the story (aka the wolf), evoking children to respond verbally, physically, and emotionally, based on their previous experiences and on-the-spot volition. There was no right or wrong answer to how the house should be built, how the story line should be like, and how children should react to the wolf. Teachers did not try to teach—they merely helped children contemplate ideas, express themselves, and solve problems in the drama. “Drama-in-education” is spontaneous and experiential to both teachers and children!
The seminar sparked off a lot of good sharing among the participating principals and teachers. Again and again, ECE is trying to move the field toward by introducing different pedagogical methods to the practitioners!
