The Workshop held on 21st February’17 at Podar World School, Sama on ‘Creative Approaches to Social and Emotional Competencies’ by Ms. Rebecca Elkin Young was a fun-packed, interesting and educating learning experience to all educators present there. Those experiences dawned its feasibility and practicality to every educator that they could carry back those strategies to be imparted in their classrooms for classroom management in a play way manner without enforcing upon them. The session on the whole was very enriching and empowering.
Ms. Rebecca visited Podar World School, Sherkhi on 22nd February, 2017 and had a lively session with students of Classes 8 to 11 at the Atelier. Foremost she visited the classes and interacted with the students who posed a few questions to her. It was during one of her class visits that she was shown the folk dance of Gujarati Garba and she literally danced ‘Teen Taali’ with them.
Students were quite eloquent with her and she too patiently and quite explicitly responded to their queries. A few questions posed to her were (i) What is the main purpose of including Drama and Theatrics in schools? (ii) What was the reaction of the student community when Donald Trump was elected as the President? (iii) What difference did she find between schools of India and New York? She responded that the Performing Arts are included to cater to the aesthetic sensibility of the learners besides it also helps as a stress buster to cope up with any kind of juvenile stress. She found Indian schools to be more disciplined and having a congenial environment that stimulated the Instructional process as compared to the schools in New York. She consented quite sincerely to the fact that even majority of Americans are unhappy about the new President especially with respect to his unfair Immigration policies but then as limitations are there and liberal minded people, there is hardly any option left with them yet she is positive and hopes for better days to come.
She took snaps with the classes gathered at the Atelier and even spend some time with them swaying to the music during ‘Happy Time’ and bid farewell to all those who gathered and to those who watched from different floors waving their hands and with the promise of meeting again to have quality time with them.
