An Intensive Seminar-Workshop

Athens, Greece, June 1998

Instructor: Despina Kakoudaki

These are some of the training exercises that I used in the seminar. New teachers often do not use creative classroom techniques because they do not know how to integrate them with their classroom style. These exercises were used to familiarize people with communicative teaching methods (how to set up creative group work, for example), and also with interdisciplinary content (how to use film sound as a teaching focus). Most of the exercises are designed to allow participants to develop an interdisciplinary component to their teaching.

The workshop experience of each of these exercises had three steps:
Demonstration: I gave the participants the exercise as a class assignment. They worked in groups to complete the task.
Discussion: After the end of the group session, we discussed what the participants thought the possible uses of each exercise would be in their own classroom. We explored the goals of each exercise, the potential dangers, and the adaptability of these techniques to many settings.
Lesson Plan: Participants then had to work alone, or in pairs, to develop a specific lesson plan using the specific technique presented in the exercise. The texts and tasks of the lesson plan were open-ended, to allow participants to customize their lesson plans to their students.
Feed-Back: In private consultations or in group discussions I gave feedback to the participants about their specific lesson plans, addressing questions such as how much time to allow for each step of a plan, or what other materials would be useful.

1. Using Comics in Teaching Film and Theater

Choose three images, photographs or other non-moving visual media and
-- use them sequentially to create a narrative possibility
-- combine the images with the text we are discussing in class
-- present the series of images as moments in a film, a news program, or a music video.

2. Using Cinematic Sound

Choose one scene from the film we are discussing and
-- write new dialogue for the characters
-- choose new auditory effects
-- change the genre of the film in some sound related way
-- replay the scene without sound
-- replay the scene with the sounds or dialogue of a different film
-- combine the scene with a non-cinematic type of visual culture

3. Using Film and Theater Texts

Choose one scene from a Shakespeare play and design lesson plans involving
-- the same scene from two other film adaptations
-- the same scene from a non-cinematic medium
-- other scenes from films that are not adaptations of this play
-- a scene from a different moment in the play (contrast between early and later representation of the characters, asking the students to imagine what happened in between the two scenes etc)

4. Using Students' Genre Literacy

"Odyssey Two: The Epic Continues"
In groups or individually, students are asked to imagine "Part Two" of a text, decide which characters continue and why, how many years intervene between sequels, or what social or cultural changes should be represented. The emphasis is on imagining how our understanding of a text changes when its ending is the beginning of a new text.

"It's a Love Story"
The emphasis of this exercise is on genre as a mode of narration, on changing the tone and genre of a text, and playing with students' knowledge and facility with genre and narrative. Rewriting the ending of a tragedy, adding "love story" soundtracks, rethinking romantic plots through soap operas, melodramas, or westerns.

"And Now For Something Completely Different"
The emphasis of this exercise is on using the non-narrative parts of a theater play as intermissions, as advertisements, as music videos, as paintings, as fairytales, as diaries, as fashion shows, as history lessons, as visual events.

"Experimental Effects
The emphasis of this exercise is on rewriting texts through non-narrative or anti-narrative processes: reversing the textual order of a monologue, reordering scenes, adding dialogue from other sources, isolating words from the text and placing them in new linguistic environments, using surrealist or absurd linguistic interventions, rewriting a tragedy as an analytical essay, staging a scene as a political demonstration.