12th July 2012 13:16
By Blue Tutors
Lego stage sets a priority? Creative learning gone mad.
Just after the Easter holidays one of my students told me that he hadn’t finished the play they were reading in class as they had been too busy building lego stage sets on the first act. Yep, I was rather mystified too. This was their second lesson, he explained, during which they had built as a group a lego representation of the detailed set in Arthur Miller’s ‘All My Sons’. As a drama student, he had thoroughly enjoyed this task.
I’m not arguing that staging isn’t important in this play - it most definitely is. But two lessons? And at the cost of actually finishing the play? Surely they would have been well served to have finished the play first before attempting to create a set that would have worked to emphasise the important themes. That way this task could have been used to identify themes and analyse just how Miller incorporated them into his set design and stage directions. With no knowledge of how the play pans out, the exercise is one of reading the directions and applying them to a model, rather than one of analysis and interpretation.
‘All My Sons’ is a short play; one that could be read in four lessons, if not as homework. Surely the reading of the complete play is the priority rather than a task which focusses on an element of the play which cannot even be used without proper analysis of its role within the whole work.