Theater teaching from the experience of high school students

Abstract

The teaching of theater has been mainly related to acting exercises, rehearsals, and presentation of a play, under the idea that doing theater (including professional practices of an actor such as improvisation, text analysis, staging, etc.) is the same as teaching it. The same thing happens in the school context, but with educational realities and challenges, especially of a methodological nature, that are revealed when considering: how secondary school students are experiencing theater teaching and what they have to tell us other than what we have conceived. Therefore, this study aimed to understand how theater teaching is developed at school, based on the experience of elementary and middle school students, to move towards the identification of aims and more relevant contents that serve as a common base in the teaching of formal theater. For this, an exploratory-descriptive investigation with a qualitative approach was implemented through a semi-structured interview, which was carried out with six students from two public educational institutions in the department of Valle del Cauca, Colombia, during the 2019-2020 period. These students participated in school theater training processes and other previous experiences with the teaching of the arts. The results found allow dimensioning aspects related to students' vision of the theater, the role of theater in the school, and the professional training of the theater teacher.