Whilst planning our workshop we decided that it would be best if we each had one or two exercises within the overall plan that we could then focus on leading and organising. However, despite this, part of the co-facilitation meant that we had to be aware of how the other exercises would run in order to be able to effectively support each other through the workshop. I believe that the support we had for one another in the run up to and during the workshop itself had to be one of the strengths as a group.
According to Taylor (2003) the use of applied drama can cause participants to respond to challenging scenarios that might leave them with more questions than answers and encourage participants to consider their own personal experiences. We chose to use a mixture of fun and focused based games and exercises to encourage to participate in the workshop, with the aim of increasing their knowledge of how to react to bullying and conflict. We chose this as our aim for the workshop because in the pre-visit Gemma led an exercise designed to gage the groups current stance on the topics and many said that they felt it was best not to tell an adult if they were being bullied. Therefore, we made the decision to try and change this opinion through the use of discussions and tableaux work. I feel that we were successful in achieving this as during the feedback section of the workshop some said that they had now learnt how to deal with bullying or conflict and that they should always ask an adult for help.
According to Taylor (2003) the use of applied drama can cause participants to respond to challenging scenarios and encourage participants to consider their own personal experiences. This was something that we needed to consider within our workshop as we were tackling a sensitive topic.
Personally, I feel that even though the games went well I should have spent more time prior to the workshop going through how I would describe the game and exercise I was facilitating as this would help the instructions to flow better and alleviate the stresses associated with this making it easier to settle into the workshop.
Another issue we faced was during the park bench exercise. During the improvisations the group were asked to solve different problems that young people may face. However, in some cases the group created characters that did not want to accept the help from others which made guiding them to solving the problem difficult for us as facilitators. To overcome this in future I would discuss solutions to the problems with the group first before asking them to improvise the scenario as this would reiterate the fact that the aim of the exercise was to solve the problem.
As we only had a week between our pre-visit and our workshop we chose to begin the planning process before out pre-visit but not make any definite decisions until after it. Doing this worked well for us as it reduced the stress of the planning process by giving us more time to consider our options. After the pre-visit we felt that some of our chosen exercises may not work successfully with certain members of the group. For example, we had originally chosen a game for our cool down exercise. However, we felt that this would wind the group up more as they could be quite competitive and would in fact do the opposite of what we intended. For this reason, we chose to have different options for the warm up and the cool down and the chose the exercise that we felt best suited the group on that particular day.
If I was to have more time in this community I would develop the tableaux exercise that we did as this was something the feedback shows the group enjoyed. To do this I would get the group to create three different tableaux, one before, during and after the scenario they were given and then encourage the group to improvise a short scene based on this work. Doing this would encourage them to think more about how they may react in these situations.
Applied Drama 