Lesson 1

We have just started our community project in which we are working with “Croydon day opportunities.” This is a centre who specialise in helping and caring for adults with learning difficulties and disabilities. We are working with nine members who are all physically able, however some of them are non-verbal or speak very little. This means it is important to adapt our teaching methods and our workshops to suit this. I do have some previous experience in working with adults with learning difficulties as I have been in a couple of plays which had a cast containing actors both with and without learning difficulties. Moreover, I have experience in teaching and directing drama. However, I have never put the two together before. I really wanted to put this experience into action with the group as we were mixed with other people with varying levels of experience in this area. It was interesting to see other people express their ideas and what their opinions were about what would make a successful workshop and what would be most enjoyable or beneficial for the members of “Croydon Day opportunities.” We discussed what we already knew about the group and how much knowledge and understanding we had about the types of challenges or issues that may occur. We listed traits that we would need in order to make ourselves come across as friendly and approachable. For example, we would need to be: enthusiastic, energetic, not patronising, understanding and patient. Carly told us that Croydon day opportunities had have previously been partnered with The BRIT School and that they had put on a final piece to show to their friends and family. I believe that a performance would highly beneficial for them as it would give them the chance to show off their talents individually and enables them to understand that you can express your feelings and emotions through performing arts. This will boost their confidence by making them feel good about themselves and proud as they are doing something that they enjoy. We were told that the general themes that they enjoyed were culture, musicals and 90s music. I feel that it would be good to include these in our workshops and the performance as they can relate to it and it is something that we are confident that they will enjoy. We split off into groups and expanded upon these initial ideas and discussed methods of how we could branch these out and develop them. An idea I liked was using the Olympics as a structure and how we could visit different cultures from around the world via the Olympics. Each time it was a new sport, we'd enter a new country, hence exploring a new culture. I feel that this idea has a lot of potential as it is creative, well-structured and incorporates aspects that we know they enjoy or are interested in. However we don’t know what the members of “Croydon day Opportunities” will think about this idea. For all we know they may not want to participate and may not like the idea and as it’s about them we need to make sure we have back up plans to adapt to them. Therefore we have to come up with a backup plan in case this idea is unsuccessful. Our idea is quite vague and we may have to be more specific and do more of the creative aspects in their behalf. We decided to narrow down our ideas and have a specific target for each week. On Friday, we want to get to know their cultures and use this as a template to base our workshops around. For example, some of them may be from Africa. Therefore we can aim next week’s lesson with some African drumming. We then decided to link together the ideas of musicals and culture.  We brain stormed this in our groups and decided that “The Lion King” would be a great one to link with African Cultures. We could incorporate African drumming and dancing along with possibly using music therapy too.  I feel this was a very productive and successful lesson and I am excited for the first workshop.