Using Prospero: how drama and technology can be applied to Covid-19 challenges and blend learning
Worcester Cathedral’s Daniel Parnell filming a virtual welcome to the historic building, to form part of their interactive learning resources in Prospero.
Today we are excited to welcome Worcester Cathedral to our Prospero family. It’s a really exciting new partnership for Prospero. The cathedral is a major national cultural landmark, a thousand years old and the last resting place of King John. Like all of us, the cathedral have had to adapt to our new times. We’re thrilled that they have chosen Prospero as their route of engaging schools in Worcester, across the UK and internationally in their important work. Working with their Education team we are using Prospero to create an immersive interactive tour of the cathedral - something that is currently impossible for schools to do in person. The ‘tour’ will include a range of creative tasks and activities, interviews with curators and expert facilitation from the cathedral’s Education team.
We will tell the story of how we’re tackling this job once their resources are live in the Prospero Library for everyone to see and share. However, it seemed a good time to give an overview on the tremendous range of partnerships we have forged over the last six months as we work with a host of organisations to help them to face down the challenges of Covid-19 and the pandemic.
Prospero has been created by, C&T, a company with huge experience in mixing drama, learning and digital technology. We’re passionate about the ways these media can be mixed to make a difference to children’s learning and social change. Hopefully this brief and not exhaustive list of our new partnerships gives a sense of how these creative forces can be mixed to enrich lives and support organisations currently facing huge challenges.
World leading practitioner Patrice Baldwin explores and demonstrates a range of techniques to support learning through drama in the primary classroom (available in October sign up for alerts)
The University of Kent’s Playing A/Part is an interdisciplinary project using Prospero to explore the identities and experiences of autistic girls and adolescents through creative and participatory research. By offering participants (aged 11-16) the opportunity to take part in a range of creative participatory activities. Prospero will help the team gain insights into how autistic girls and adolescents experience themselves and their world.
The University of Gloucestershire are creating virtual tours of their campuses, to help students making informed choices about potential future courses of study. Through Prospero’s ‘gamification’ tools, they are make these choices more playful and interactive.
White Socks Theatre are creating theatre resources to help teachers support the mental health and wellbeing of primary school children as they return to work post-lockdown (coming in October).
Eco Birmingham have created a series of interactive cycle routes exploring the history and culture of the City of Birmingham. Using Prospero’s GPS functions, these journeys use your smartphone to help you navigate routes and magically reveal hidden videos, archived materials and audio interviews.
Daniel Parnell leads a creative exercise in Prospero, exploring the lives of the cathedral’s monks over the centuries.
University of South Carolina, USA, are creating Process Drama teaching materials and projects to teach drama students remotely, as part of their Master of Arts teaching program in Theatre Education.
Telling the stories of Birmingham’s migrant communities digitally is the focus of Bearwood Action for Refugees. 36000 Humans helped them save their existing work by transferring their creative programmes online during lockdown.
If you want to learn how to practice physical theatre whilst socially distancing, try Nicola Chamber’s free workshop for KS4 and 5 in the Prospero Library.
50 Days: Alone Together is an ambitious interactive drama devised and performed entirely online by 10 young people. Check out Peer Productions innovative and challenging work.
In Nairobi, Kenya three different community groups are using Prospero to support issues such as violence against women and study skills for new students entering higher education from challenging backgrounds.
As you can see, over the last six months we have shaped some remarkable new relationships. We’ve learnt so many new ways to fuse drama and technology, but we are still looking for new possibilities. If you’d like to explore concepts, ideas or content please get in touch. We are open to new ideas and potential new partnerships. We’d love to hear your ideas!
Don’t forget the wealth of other free resources already available in the Prospero Library. Next week we will be announcing an exciting new online collaboration project available to anyone, anywhere. So there is plenty more to come from Prospero!