Look Into My World : An Interview with Drama students at St Columba's College, Essendon
In 2006 students from a Year 10 Drama elective at St Columba's College, along with their teacher Judy Jack, devised and presented a performance called "Look Into My World". This performance was originally performed for Year 7 and 8 students at the College and provided a snap-shot into the lives of young people by including such issues as friendship, exclusion, parental relationships, self doubt, identity and cyberbullying.
"It was a long process to devise the play. We began exploring different ideas and using some newspaper articles to get some inspiration and focus our thoughts and ideas. We discussed a lot of ideas before settling on the idea of targeting students coming into the College at Year 7 and the challenges of making new friends and dealing with peer pressure. It felt a bit awkward at the beginning because we were looking at issues that were quite personal, but as we became more comfortable with each other we were able to make it more realistic."
Following the performance, the Drama students paired up and facilitated a small group discussion about the performance with the students from the audience. "We discussed what had been presented in the performance and talked about strategies they could use if any of these things happened to them. We stressed that it's important to speak out about them." As well as promoting a positive school environment, the students were able to see the instant results of their performance. "We had a couple of girls in one of the groups who'd had a falling-out before the play, but during the discussion after the play they got back together. Relationships have an impact on a student's ability to learn. If you don't feel good about yourself, you're not going to want to listen in class. If you're happy with your environment and the people around you then you'll learn. It's important to have the support of the teachers and other students around you."
One scene explored the deterioration in a relationship between a mother and her daughter. "The reaction to that scene was always interesting. The students in the audience discussed that bit the most and many of them said 'I'm going to go home and give my mum a hug'. That was a really big scene because they could already see what they're doing in their relationships with their parents and it makes them feel bad. The point that we wanted to get across was that it's not that you don't love your mum but that your friends might seem more interesting at different times."
As well as the original audience of Year 7 and 8 students, "Look Into My World" has been performed for students in other levels as well at the CEOM Student Wellbeing Conference in April. "We've performed in now to a variety of audiences and we get different reactions each time. Although we'd created it for a younger audience, we found that it still meant something when we performed it to students in our own year level. We found it really enjoyable to perform it to an audience of teachers. It was great to see an adult audience getting so much out of it. When we were devising it we didn't realise it would be so well received, but the discussions after the performance showed us that different students were taking things out of it that had real meaning to them. We realised after we'd performed it a few times that it was making a positive difference to the relationships in our school community."
