Doing Theatre: Theatre Pedagogy through the Folktale

Abstract

Theatre Pedagogy holds that cognition is body-based. Through performance the body’s unconscious procedural memory learns. This information learned through repeated interaction with the world is transmitted to the brain where it becomes conscious knowledge. Theatre Pedagogy in this case study is based on the implementation of a Caribbean cultural art form in performance, in order to teach Francophone language and literature at the postsecondary level in Jamaica. This paper describes the experience of “doing theatre” with seven university students to learn the French language and literature based on an adaptation of two of Birago Diop’s folktales. In the process of learning and performing the plays, the students also understood some of the West African cultural universals of life which cut across the lives of learners in their own and in foreign cultural contexts.