It is a fair question. After all over the last ten years or so the world has changed beyond recognition. Students and teachers are a lot more familiar with screens and apps than they used to be and we all basically live in an online world as well as the real world. And now, with the rise of AI, teachers can instantly create interesting lessons based on short videos and social media posts that their students can relate to. Do we need the outdated medium of educational theatre in our schools any more. That is the question we will look at in this blog. There are six sections ……
- We live in a virtual world.
- Being online is fine, but so is face-to-face.
- Lost in the fog.
- Finding a way out of the fog.
- The benefits of being bored.
- A show is more than just entertainment.
We live in a virtual world.
It seems hard to argue with this statement, for myself at least. I spend a lot of my time travelling and playing live theatre shows, which means that much of my work does not involve screens, but I still turn to my laptop or my phone at every opportunity, either to check my mail, or to let myself get distracted by my youtube or social media feeds. Most people use their phones in different ways during the day, as alarm clocks, credit cards, or the way to buy tickets online. Screens offer us any form of entertainment that we can imagine and we gobble it all up, every day. The students that we are teaching grew up in this world, they are totally familiar with it. Does it not make sense then for us to create English lessons that relate to this world and which our students can feel close to? Is it not ridiculous to make them pay to see something as old-fashioned and clumsy as live theatre?
Being online is fine, but so is face-to-face.
This is a line from a poem by teacher-trainer Mark Andrews in which he thinks about the interactions he could be having with his son if they were not both looking at their mobile phones. In the show I Love My Phone, which Mark and I created together, we look at the impact that smartphones, video games and social media are having on our lives today. In one scene we show how, in a town we don’t know, people used to ask strangers for directions, while today they find their way with the help of navigation in their phone. The point of the scene is that, while our lives are far more efficient and convenient today when we have a device that tells us exactly where to go, on the other hand we are losing a lot of small-scale human interactions, especially with strangers, as our world becomes more and more automated and we become more and more isolated from eachother.
These small interactions have value, they connect us to the real world, and are more important than we realize. Theatre may be old-fashioned, but it also is face-to-face and it is real. It is real people talking to other real people in real time and it has a social value beyond any videos or even social-media.
Lost in the fog.
While the internet has made our lives more convenient and exciting, it also leads us down a miriad of rabbit holes which can result in feelings of isolation and depression. Smartphones just accentuate all of this as we can be online all day long if we want to be.
There are debates about whether smartphones should be allowed in schools. On the one hand they are of course incredible educational resources, they give us all the information in the world at our fingertips, on the other hand we recognize that they can be a great distraction, and a dangerous source of addiction and compulsive behaviour. Studies show that when smartphones became common, levels of depression and even suicide among students rose dramatically. Some countries ban the use of social media for people under sixteen years of age. When we take each thing individidually it seems that everything that the internet offers us makes our life better, information, convenience, entertainment, we never need to be bored. Taken all together though, it can be too much and people are becoming depressed as they go deeper into the rabbit hole looking for new forms of stimulation.
Finding a way out of the fog.
What is the way out of this fog? In our show we suggest that one way out may be finding time to embrace elements of the old-fashioned tech-free life that we once knew. This can mean practical hobbies like gardening or crafts, it could mean something like taking a picture with a real camera, even developing the pictures. It could be playing vinyl records off a record player, or it could be live entertainment.
We all realize, I think, that there is a difference in quality between the experiences and interactions we have online and the ones we have in real life. This is not to say that the relationships we have onliíne are of no value, just that they are not the same. We all remember the desperation of the covid times when teaching was exclusively online and many students met with feelings of anxiety and isolation. Now we are in no doubt that we want our students to be in real schools, socializing with their peers and learning face-to-face with their teachers. Theatre in schools supports this mindset. A live show is not only an entertainment and a way to make students feel good about learning a language, it is also a social event and a great reminder that there is a world outside the internet where people meet new people and have fun in eachother’s company.
The benefits of being bored.
Research suggests that being bored is not a bad thing. We need space in our lives to be still and process what is going on. It is when we are bored that we have ideas and find creative ways to prevent ourselves from being bored. It is true that some video games encourage strategizing and creativity, but on the whole, people who endlessly fill their minds with external stimulation do not leave themselves space to encourage their own creativity. That is a shame because being creative is a great source of self-estime. This is true of larger creations, but it is also true of small scale creations like problems we solve around the house or even things we think to say during conversations or social interactions. Being creative is also a great source of student motivation.
A show is more than just entertainment.
When you invite a live theatre to play in your school, you are not just providing your students with a valuable learning experience, you are giving them another reference to the old world that was once normal and still is for those who embrace it. Some students will always be indifferent to theatre, but I know that for many it is a revelation and an inspiration, it was for me when I was a student. Inviting a theatre to your school may end up helping your students more than you realize.
