Tactics used by street mimes can be used in classrooms.
In a kindergarten-through-grade 12 school, one of a teacher's most crucial goals is to keep every student in her classroom engaged. She can achieve that by varying types of activities and modes of teaching. According to a website article by Richard M. Felder and Barbara A. Soloman, who teach at North Carolina State University, "visual learners remember best what they see." Suzanne Miller, a Diablo Valley College instructor who wrote an article on learning styles, notes that kinesthetic, or tactile, learners benefit most from being "physically active in the learning environment." By introducing visual performance, such as mime, teachers can actively engage visual and tactile learners who are often ignored in traditional, lecture-style classroom sessions.
Instructions
1. Teach students basic information about the art of mime. Invite a mime to perform in class, or show the class videos of mime performances. Provide books and other resources about mime for students to read outside of class.
2. Dress students as mimes. Set up makeup and clothing stations in the classroom. Paint each student's face entirely white. Give students black paint to add details, such as triangles or circles around eyes or on cheeks. Provide each student with a black shirt, white gloves and black hat to wear.
3. Engage students in large-group mime warm-up exercises. Form a large circle, and begin with basic mime exercises, such as throwing an imaginary ball. Progress to more difficult exercises, such as walking against a strong wind or being stuck in a box.
4. Write topics pertaining to your class on note cards. They will become topics for mime performances. Use subjects, actions or events, and write a different topic on each card. Shuffle the cards into one deck.
5. Shuffle the note cards into one deck.
6. Ask students to perform a mime for their peers. Invite individual or small groups of students to draw a note card from the deck. Instruct students to create a mime based on the note card's topic, and allow a preset amount of time for each performer or group of performers to rehearse the mime before its presentation.
7. Integrate the mime performances to reinforce material presented through lectures and readings. Discuss the performances as a class. Also give students time to write a journal response to their performance and the performances of their classmates. Quiz the students on class material covered through the mime performances.
