Workshops

Talia currently teaches drama at the University of Winnipeg. She also has many years of experience teaching drama in the public school system. Since 1987, she has also acted as an adjudicator in Speech Arts and Drama Festivals throughout Manitoba and Northwestern Ontario.

She has conducted many drama workshops for teachers, actors and community groups. Since publishing her book, Stages: Creative Ideas for Teaching Drama, she has also developed workshops tailored to fit the groups that she is working with. Drama is an excellent medium to utilize in Professional Development for any staff. It can be highly effective as a team building workshop or as a means of re-energizing hard working professionals. Workshops are designed to fit your specific objectives.

Books

Teaching drama is the most rewarding of teaching experiences, Not only are students developing a set of skills for the stage, they are increasing their self confidence and ability to work cooperatively, express themselves publicly, explore their own creativity and above all, to have fun.

After years of teaching dram in the public school system, I had a wealth of exercises which I had collected or developed in my classroom. I began teaching university education students who were about to embark on careers as drama teachers. As I passed around handouts of exercises and gave students yet another page of notes to write out, a student suggested that I should just put in all in a book. This book is an effort to file all those exercises into one package that is easy to carry and easy to use. The exercises are categorized to allow their use as tools to build a lesson.

This book is packed with drama exercises that work. All have been tested on the harshest of critics, high school students. There is a minimum of theorizing about an exercise or pontificating on its value. There are many other books that do that very well. Nor am I here to sell anyone on the value of drama in the classroom or as a tool in the rehearsal process. This book is for educators who already believe that. The purpose of this book is to simply provide ideas to use in a teaching environment. They are laid out in as clear, concise a manner as possible, categorized according to their purpose.

It is my hope that this book will be useful to a variety of people in teaching situations:

• Student Teachers collecting resource material for future use.
• Substitute teachers thrown into classroom situations, drama or otherwise.
• Teachers from other subject areas who want to add creative touches to their lessons.
• Teachers who don’t have a drama background that are asked to teach an introductory drama course.
• Professional actors and directors wanting to teach beginning acting workshops.
• Any leader of children or adults wanting to add a drama component to a course or workshop.
• Drama teachers looking for new exercises ideas.

The exercises in this book can be used in isolation to simply fill a spare moment of class time, or they can be used to create a drama workshop or an entire first level drama course. They are suitable for a wide range of ages and abilities and can be adapted for young children, beginning teenagers as well as experienced actors.

“Stages is a excellent book for any teacher, whether or not they are a drama teacher. The actvities laid out in the book are easy to implement with any topic being covering in class, allowing the teacher to get their students up and moving out of their desks to make learning fun. I’ve even used the book as the foundation to start up an after-school drama club.”

Eric
Grade 5/6 Teacher

• Theatre Books (Toronto)
• Biz Books (Vancouver)
• Chapters
• McNally Robinson