Milli mála - 01.01.2010, Síða 171

Theatre projects in foreign-language teaching are interdiscipli -
nary projects38, and with Top Dogs, apart from the benefits for lan -
guage learning, I was interested in the working process, the impro -
visations, the rewriting of the play, the ideas the students developed,
and the excitement and challenges of the performances. I was also
interested in the dramatic text (the written play which we used as our
base), how students would interpret it, and how it would help us to
explore and examine something in a way we would not usually be
able to do in our everyday life, in our ‘real life’. In our particular
project it seemed unhelpful – maybe even impossible – to divide pro-
cess-oriented and product-oriented approaches, as we clearly needed
a variety of methods for our interdisciplinary project. In line with
Moody39, I think that both an open learning environment and theatre
projects which work towards the performance of a play are useful
and can compliment each other, and that a dichotomy between pro-
cess-oriented and product-oriented approaches should not exist.
Rewriting: drama and creative writing
I wanted to integrate some creative writing techniques into this
theatre project as I wanted the students to feel responsible and be
actively engaged with the dramatic text they would be perform-
ing. I did not want them to learn any lines without thinking about
the meaning first, but I wanted them to become aware of how
they wanted to play their text, what seemed difficult to them and
why, and how their play would correspond to other aspects in the
play, such as the relationship to other people in the play. These
are some of the aspects the participants of that course were
supposed to document and reflect upon in a journal as part of a
portfolio (see next section below). This task also meant that they
would be asked to be actively involved in the meaning-making of
the rewritten manuscript and the performance, as they could
change expressions, small parts of their scripts, pauses, and em -
phasis, but all closely linked to the play we were using. It was up
to the students how much of this creative writing task – rewriting
anDrEa MILDE anD ÁSTa IngIBJarTSDÓTTIr
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38 For a discussion of the arts in foreign language as an interdisciplinary approach, see Janet
Hegman Shier, “The arts and the Foreign-/Second-Language Curriculum”, p. 184.
39 Douglas J. Moody, “undergoing a Process and achieving a Product”, pp. 138–139.
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