Week 10 – The Empty Pot

Today in School Drama, I was lucky enough to see the drama activity teacher in role in action. As part of my English assignment, we were required to identify some drama activities appropriate for the novel we had chosen and my group had put in teacher in role as one of the activities. I knew that teacher in role is when the teacher takes on the role of a character but I had never seen it done in the classroom context and therefore I didn’t quite understand how I would go about it in my classroom.

The teaching artist told the story of The Empty Pot by Charlotte Dumaresq Hunt. The story was about a boy named Ping who lived in China. The Emperor gave a flower seed to each child in the kingdom and they child with the most impressive plant would become the heir. Ping takes extremely good care of his seed but nothing grows so he goes to the Emperor embarrassed as all around him, the other child have beautiful growing plants. The story concludes in the Emperor telling the child he had actually boiled the seed so those seeds could not grow, so Ping becomes the heir.

The teaching artist spoke as the narrator and as the character Ping. She used gestures and her voice to engage and focus students on how Ping was feeling and what was happening in the story. Students were very absorbed in the story. I liked how the teaching artist introduced new words such as heir and emperor because the student may not have heard hose words before as they were in Year 2. As Campbell (2013) explains, “When teachers engage in imaginative learning experiences, such as oral storytelling with children, they provide environments that build language, literacy and deeper understandings about the world” (p.39).

She also involved students in the story. For example, when the other children in the story had brought their plants to the emperor, the teaching artist asked the students listening to the story about what plants they had brought.

I thought that this story was rich because there are so many ways you could explore the story. For example:

•           Students experiment with status: play the Status Game where one students is the Emperor and other students are the servants who try to please the Emperor
•           Explore the theme and moral of the story: honesty. Through character, what makes Ping an honest boy?
•          Link to other KLAs such as HSIE, researching emperors in China (for example, Emperor Yong Le who ordered a new capital called Beijing to be built in 1404)
•           Writing: from a different character’s point of view, for example, point of view from another family whose seed was not growing. What did they do? How did they try to get the seed to grow?

I really liked seeing teacher in role in action but I don’t feel quite confident enough to do it myself yet. Maybe if I saw more of it then I could because I want to incorporate it in my classroom when I’m on my practical experience.