Last One!!!

Clearly all of Buckingham's ideas are written for class that is focused on media. As a theatre teacher, I can't use these ideas as they are written in my classroom. Maybe broadcast journalism and newspaper could use them verbatim, maybe a college film class. As a theatre class, I wouldn't be teaching how media targets it's audience, or about how media re-presents information in a specific way to say something. I wouldn't be teaching them the language of media.

So how do I modify his ideas to where they fit in a theatre classroom? 




While a lot of his key concepts are media specific, they can be altered to teach theatre. It is equally important for theatre students to know their target audience and how to cater to them. It is equally important to know the production aspects for theatre. Buckingham listed things like "who writes the texts? how do they get to their desired audiences? are there laws about production and distribution? whose voices are heard?" He is speaking specifically about media texts, but it is important for students to know these things about theatre texts as well. It translates into things like studying playwrights, and the history of censorship in theatre, and writing texts themselves. Another key concept that translates over to theatre nicely is representation. Theatre is representation, and the questions about realism and telling the truth and interpretation are important ones. 
If you study media and focus on nonverbal communication, it can help you to teach your actors about nonverbal communication. You can teach them how important facial expressions, body language, movement and tone are.

I really like the examples he wrote about on how to teach about media. They have a lot of great parts to them and can easily be adapted to teaching theatre. To show you, I am going to take one of his examples and adapt it...

Photography and Identity: the first project, where they look at photos that a fourteen year old girl had taken and they arrange them - you can assign a play to read and have them arrange photos into a photo documentary that explores the feelings of the main character. BOOM. the second project, I would cut or shorten very much. the third project, I would actually have them make the documentary they proposed, but they would need to interview the characters in the play (so it would most likely be either a class project or a group project).

While Buckingham wasn't writing with us Theatre and English teachers in mind, he has a lot of good ideas and a lot of good theories that we can take and adapt for our classrooms.