Education

Today we on the scene that will come after the soundscape we have created. This ends by Dan (who is the teacher) making a very loud bang, taking us back into Victorian times. He starts by telling us to get our books out, then walks around the classroom in silence making comments to each student such as 'sit up straight'. We then decided we wanted some kind of repeated movement to show the control that the teachers had over the students and emphasize that everyone did the same. I had the idea that instead of having music we could just have the simple sound of a metronome so that it wasn't silent and we would all keep in time, it also represents the idea of time passing. Punishment is a big difference between school now and then, with the use of the cane and dunce hat Victorian times were much harsher. To add this to the scene I thought that we could have one of the students knock something off of their desk, followed by them being taken up to the front and hit with the cane. After trying different ways to make it look realistic we decided on using a sound effect and having the boy and teacher angled so you don't see the contact of the cane on him.

Victorian school research

What was a Victorian classroom like?

There were maps and perhaps pictures on the wall. There would be a globe for geography lessons, and an abacus to help with sums. Children sat in rows and the teacher sat at a desk facing the class. At the start of the Victorian age, most teachers were men, but later many women trained as teachers.

Children wrote on slates with chalk. They wiped the slate clean, by spitting on it and rubbing with their coat sleeve or their finger! Slates could be used over and over. For writing on paper, children used a pen with a metal nib, dipped into an ink well.

What subjects did children learn?

Girls and boys learned together in primary schools, but were separated in secondary schools. Both boys and girls learned reading, writing, arithmetic, spelling and drill (PE).

Boys learned technology: woodwork, maths and technical drawing, to help with work in factories, workshops or the army when they grew up.

Girls had lessons in cooking and sewing, to prepare them for housework and motherhood.

Children were often taught by copying and repeating what the teacher told them. Lessons included teaching in right and wrong, and the Christian religion.

How were children punished?

Discipline in schools was often strict. Children were beaten for even minor wrongdoings, with a cane, on the hand or bottom. A teacher could also punish a child by making them stand in the corner wearing a 'dunce's cap'. Another, very boring, punishment was writing 'lines'. This meant writing out the same sentence (such as 'Schooldays are the happiest days of my life' 100 times or more.

Rich boys and schools for girls

Boys from rich families were sent away to boarding school. Some 'public schools', like Eton and Harrow, set high standards.

Other schools were awful places, run to make profits for the owners. Boys in these bad schools were half-starved, ill-treated, and taught very little.

Girls sent away to be trained as governesses were not much better off, as you can learn from reading Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.

Girls and young boys were taught at home by a male tutor or a female governess. The first good girls' schools were started in Victorian times, such as the North London Collegiate School (1850).

I also found a few short, very helpful videos on this website. 

Victorian school videos

I think the main difference between schools now and then is the amount of control that the teachers had over their students. Their ability to punish the students meant that behavior was much better than it is in modern schools. In our scene we discuss this and the differences, with Dan suggesting we bring back the cane and such.  

Education

We have spent two lessons writing the script for the scene that we have planned. We really want it to be realistic and emanate a normal school teachers meeting so we have spent a long time editing the language and order of things. We went through our finished script with one of our teachers to help us refine it and make sure it was all accurate, so he helped us to add in some things and slightly alter some of the lines. Within the script we have added in some facts and quotes about education that we have found online so that it is not all made up dialogue and we incorporate some real opinions.

Education

Today we moved on from the soundscape to create a scene that was based on quality dialogue. We decided to create a 'meeting' situation between teachers much like the play we went to see Future Conditional. I think this will be a good way to get across what we are trying to show by having the teachers discuss issues and developments in education that are current. We have created different characters for each teacher to try and show a realistic situation and show how different peoples reactions will be to comments and make the meeting as natural as possible, also making it more interesting as the different personalities may clash or disagree at times. 

Education

Today we started discussing an opening for our education idea. We thought we could start with a soundscape in a modern classroom, then as the noise builds up gradually the teacher will put in a cap and gown similar to a teacher from the past. The teacher will then make a loud noise, maybe with a can, and the classroom will go silent and we will now be in Victorian times. In doing this we will show the contrast between modern and olden day school and how the discipline and control has changed. We started to try and create a soundscape for the start but it started to become childish and messy quite quickly so we decided that we would just use noises and sound effects that we could overlap and make louder.

Contact improvisation

I found this video on contact improvisation which I thought would help us to get more into the feeling of it as I feel it would go well with a slavery piece. The constant connection at the center of gravity reflects how slaves were often chained together and how they had to rely on each other for a little bit of reassurance. I really like how the people in the video don't think about it, but manage to support and lift each other without holding them with their hands, just using their body weight and counteracting each other. 

Inspiration

This is a photo of how I imagine the Victorian classroom our scene is set in. This picture helped me to think of using the separate desks for the classroom scene which we could then move and incorporate into our meeting table. The very rigid and strict setting of this classroom emphasizes the control in Victorian times and shows the differences between now and then very well. They are all doing work and look completely focused which is the atmosphere we have created in our Victorian scene. I like the fact that this picture is black and white as I think it adds another clarity to the situation and highlights how much has changed, including technology now and then and maybe how that could be another factor influencing students behavior.

Education

A big inspiration to our education piece is the new play 'Future Conditional'. Here is a clip of Rob Brydon talking about the show. The ideas explored in the play are what gave us the idea of doing education. Seeing the school word on stage made it clear that there are obvious flaws in the system that aren't being fixed, one of them being behavior. We decided to focus on this and the lack of control teachers now have, compared to different times in history. 

Contemporary duet

I absolutely love this dance. It has such a clear story line and shows how you can use movement effectively to create a piece, without using dialogue. I love the naturalistic movements and contact between the couple, including the simple yet really effective lifts. We could use some of the control elements where the man is manipulating and moving her into different positions, also their conflict can very easily be related to many topics. 

Initial idea

Today we were brainstorming ideas again, looking at our options and what we could do. While discussing the theme 'Humanity in Crisis' we got onto the topic of education. We had recently been on a trip to see a new play called 'Future Conditional' which was all about education and has inspired us to look more into it. As we are all in the education system it is something that we all have ideas for and have an opinion on. We had an idea that we could show how different school is, especially the behavior and the pupil-teacher relationship, in the present compared to the past then maybe a look into how it will be in the future.

Inspiration

I really like this photograph. It shows a group of children ready to be taken away from their home during Kindertansport. I like the fact that it is an actual photograph because it highlights the realness of it all. All of the children in the picture are different, different ages, sizes and gender. I like the idea of telling different stories, real stories of children who have been through Kindertransport. For example the little boy with the violin or what like a little brother and older sister, making it more like following personal journeys instead of it just being a sort of documentary about Kindertransport.

Contact improvisation - drugs

In this lesson we had to chose another idea from our mind map to create using one of the techniques. We chose to do slavery as we were pretty sure we would not choose it as our main idea but thought it would be a good theme to workshop as it has lots of scope for pieces that we could incorporate 'control' into. We decided to start on the floor, holding hands (to represent being chained together) as if in a boat after being shipped to a foreign country to be sold and used as slaves. After some contact improvisation between the masters and the slaves I had the idea that the slaves should also do some contact together. I think this would help to emphasize the control that the slaves were under and how there was still hierarchy  between the slaves with women being more badly treated than the men. This video shows the short piece of movement we created.

Research - Kindertransport

KINDERTRANSPORT, 1938–1940

Kindertransport (Children's Transport) was the informal name of a series of rescue efforts which brought thousands of refugee Jewish children to Great Britain from Nazi Germany between 1938 and 1940.

Background

Nazi authorities staged a violent pogrom upon Jews in Germany on November 9–10, 1938, known asKristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass). After the pogrom, the British government eased immigration restrictions for certain categories of Jewish refugees. British authorities agreed to allow an unspecified number of children under the age of 17 to enter Great Britain from Germany and German-annexed territories (that is, Austria and the Czech lands). They were spurred by British public opinion and the persistent efforts of refugee aid committees. Notable among the refugee aid committees were the British Committee for the Jews of Germany and the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany.

The Transports

The first Kindertransport arrived in Harwich, Great Britain, on December 2, 1938. It brought some 200 children from a Jewish orphanage in Berlin which had been destroyed in the Kristallnachtpogrom. Most transports left by train from Berlin, Vienna, Prague, and other major cities in central Europe. Children from smaller towns and villages traveled from their homes to these collection points in order to join the transports.

Jewish organizations inside the Greater German Reich planned the transports. These organizations were the Reich Representation of Jews in Germany, headquartered in Berlin; after early 1939, its successor organization the Reich Association of Jews in Germany; and the Jewish Community Organization (Kultusgemeinde) in Vienna. They generally favored children whose emigration was urgent because their parents were in concentration camps or were no longer able to support them. They also gave priority to homeless children and orphans.

Children chosen for a Kindertransport convoy traveled by train to ports in Belgium and the Netherlands, from where they sailed to Harwich. At least one of the early transports left from the port of Hamburg in Germany. Some children from Czechoslovakia were flown by plane directly to Britain. The last transport from Germany left on September 1, 1939, just as World War II began. The last transport from the Netherlands left for Britain on May 14, 1940, the same day that the Dutch army surrendered to German forces.

After the War

Many children from the children's transport program became citizens of Great Britain, or emigrated to Israel, the United States, Canada, and Australia. Most of them would never again see their parents, who were murdered during the Holocaust.

Scripted scene

Today we were given a short scene from a play to perform to help us to work on our dialogue skills. I think creating dialogue is our weakest skill and so this will help us, being a good example of published dialogue. The play was meant to be performed in south african accents, which is another technique we could think about in our devising, but south african is a hard accent that many of us are not great at. I thought the scene was okay although without the rest of the play it was slightly uneventful as it was just people talking/arguing in a living room.  

Slavery video

This video is a piece about slavery that the Northeast Ballet has created for their 'Stories that Dance' program. Stories that Dance was an educational program organized by Proctor's Theatre in Schenectady NY which sent members of the non-profit Northeast Ballet Company and resident company at Proctor's to elementary schools. Each class involved wrote a story, and dancers worked with the students to make those stories come to life on stage. This is a really good example of movement and I think we can incorporate some of the steps and ideas in our slavery piece. I also like the way they have used a silhouetted lighting which makes you focus more on what is actually going on rather than the characters. It makes the whole piece non personal, and should detach the audience from the people and get the message across, a bit like Brechterian style pieces. 

Kinder transport mind map

These are the ideas I have come up with to start our piece on Kinder transport. The main thing I want to achieve is to involve the audience in the piece and take them back to the time when it actually happened. I think using music from the era will be a good way to create an atmosphere of the time period and help make the audience feel part of it.