Wilhelm Chapter 4

I was especially excited about this chapter when I started reading it because it focuses on the use of drama in the classroom to help students engage in the literature that they are reading. My dream teaching job would be a theatre arts position that allows me to direct the school play and teach drama/shakespeare/speech. It is safe to say, then, that my classroom will use many dramatic excercises towards the purpose of "discovering" something in the texts that my students read. Some of the activities that the author describes are better suited for my teaching style than others, and some of them I have studied before as well. The guided imagery activity is something that several students used in an earlier education classroom group project, and it seemed to go over quite well. Having a theatre backgroung means that I also have numerous books on teaching theatre and most of them have many (it is a staple of the theatre world) fun and interesting activities to stimulate the mind and get people thinking as their character would (thus, getting them much more involved in critically analyzing the texts that they are interacting with). One of my favorite activities is one where the students create a character that does not exsist and have that character interact with characters from the text that do exsist. It forces them to analyze the characters they interact with in the literature and make decisions for that character based on their experiences with them through the text.