Sometimes being challenged by using another space pushes teachers to be more creative and gets them out of their comfort zone. The space has a big impact not only on students but on teachers as well. I will share here my story of how changing the space led to creating a lesson that was fun, engaging and memorable for students.

For the last three weeks of the academic year, students were planned to work on their final exhibition, preparing their infographics or building physical models. In the norm, we would be in our classroom where some students would be using computers or their tablets, and the others would be building physical models using the available resources in the class.

I got a message from administration that there is a fault in the alarm system and everyone needs to be evacuated from the building and allocated to other rooms in other buildings on campus.

At the beginning, it was a shock, as the other allocated room didn’t have computers and not all my students had access to digital devices, which made the infographic task out of the question. We cannot move all resources for model building, so the model building task could not be conducted as well. I had no choice but to plan a new lesson for the new space and it had to be creative and fun to engage students, especially when they were to experience a totally new environment. My toolkit for the lesson planning was the embodied learning framework, which resulted from the PhD research I conducted in collaboration with students. Through movement, social and physical interaction, my aim was to help students accommodate to the new environment and engage in a creative learning activity.

Embodied Lesson Planned

I thought of the workshop we had with the Royal Ballet and Opera School (RBO), where they introduced us to some techniques we can do with students to help them unleash their creativity. I downloaded some of the resources found on the RBO website and decided to do some enacting as an embodied activity. (Link to Resources)

The room we were booked in was a typical classroom, with clusters of tables and chairs. Tables were heavy and didn’t have wheels, so moving things around was a bit hard.

But there was some clear space in the middle. It felt so formal, especially as the classroom was not as big as our studio. This was about 6 by 7 meters.

To break up this formality and get students to move a bit, I asked students to grab a chair and come in to join me in the centre for a quick discussion to get to know more about their experience with theatre. I had 10 students on the day, so the central space could fit us all. However, if it was a full class, the space would not have fit all and would have made this movement and group discussion impossible, leading students to stay in a static position during most of the lesson.

We had a quick discussion, then I asked all students to return the seats and sit in small groups to conduct a warm-up task to help them in the creativity process. Moving students from one place to another throughout the lesson keeps them active and alert for the next task, which is something the space either supports or deters. This is where the learning space design role is important to be linked with pedagogy and used to support it and not hinder it.

The starter task involved creating a zine from an A4 paper, origami (Link), and then they had to draw three sketches: one with their eyes closed, the second with their non-dominant hand, and the third drawing their colleagues.

This starter was to help them start drawing and get into the tasks. After that I introduced them to the brief, which is designing a set design. I picked The Winter’s Tale (Link). The resource had the vision and the different sets. It was a tale from Shakespeare and students could select the time and location in which they would set their play.

However, the names were a bit hard to remember, and knowing me and how terrible I am at remembering names. Besides, just to get students to better engage with the task and give them some ownership of the play, I asked them to choose the names of the characters in the play.

Involving students in creating their characters and selecting their names helped students to engage better in creative writing (a workshop students engaged with at the Live Theatre as part of my research with children), so I wanted to apply the same, and it worked perfectly well and took a very funny angle which I didn’t expect.

In the play, the original names were: King Leontes, his wife Hermione, and child (Mamillius), and King Polixenes. The hilarious part is that students didn’t pick just normal names, but picked names from their current institution, their tutors, and I ended up in the play together with other staff. The relationship between the characters was a weird combination, and the twists as the story unfolded made things even more hilarious with concepts of jealousy, love, accusations, and death. Students were laughing and more engaged in designing the costume of the characters, as they related those characters to the people they knew. So they combined the norm of a king costume with other design features related to the character they selected from college. They also enacted in ways where they imagined the staff would behave if he/she was to be a king. But it also made the environment funnier with every other student suggesting ideas and additions that would make the scene more realistic and fun. Students also had to design props and enact freezes from the play, building their confidence and working as a team.

We didn’t have time to engage with designing the set design in that lesson, but it was definitely a memorable experience and a lesson students enjoyed, as they kept talking about it among themselves and sharing it with other staff members.

Space

This all started with a change in the physical space, a challenge given to the teacher to get out of his/her comfort zone and create something different from the norm. Having a variety of spaces supports teachers and students in moving and using the spaces differently and urges teachers to think of new activities that the space supports. However, teachers need to be trained in how to use the space to their benefit and not focus only on the material to be delivered.

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