Cross Curricular Oral Communication

For the first three years of my teaching experience, I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to teach drama to a wide range of students and their learning levels. What I find funny is that it was not until I began my formal teacher’s education that I realized that what I thought was simply just sharing my passion for Drama with my students coincided with the requirements of the Oral communication strand.

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It is a fact that we spend about seventy percent of our daily lives is communicating with others through various forms. Of this seventy percent, thirty percent of our communication comes from speaking. When this fact was brought to my attention it put into perspective just how important it is to teach our students how to communicate thoughtfully and effectively. I feel as though there is not enough stress placed on the importance of Oral communication, especially in the classroom, so I am going to make it my own mission to change this notion once I begin my practicum and into my future classroom. Once I decided to incorporate more Oral communication activities in my classroom I went looking for different activities online that I could practice in class and that is when I realized just how much Arts education coincides with the curriculum requirements for oral communication.

The Oral Communication connections in the Arts and Language Curriculum.

In a few excerpts from each curriculum doc, I realized both the arts curriculum and the Language curriculum had similar things to say about oral communication. For example, in the Language curriculum it states: “To develop their oral communication skills, students need numerous opportunities to listen and to talk about a range of subjects, including personal interests, school work, and current affairs” (Language curriculum doc pg 9) While the Arts curriculum doc has something similar to say about using oral communication in the arts. “Through purposeful talk, students not only learn to communicate information but also explore and come to understand ideas and concepts, identify and solve problems, organize their experience and knowledge, and express and clarify their thoughts, feelings, and opinions.” (Arts Curriculum doc pg 51) It is clear that through purposeful and effective instruction in the arts we are able to teach cross-curricular expectations, once I came to this realization I thought about one particular activity I did with my drama class that touched upon each of the important aspects of developing oral communication.

Orally Communicative, Cross-Curricular Activities in Practice. 

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I once ran an activity where the students were given the opportunity to research an important current event and it was their job to present this topic to the class in the form of a news report. I really liked being able to do this activity with my drama class, I was teaching it at the time only focusing on the dramatic elements of it, however, an activity such as this could easily span across the requirements for both the arts and the language curriculum. What is a simple activity to run is one that gets students to focus on what is happening in the world around them, it gives them the opportunity to form their own opinions and most importantly it gives them the chance to speak to their classmates through presentations and focused talk. It is a wonderful cross-curricular activity that I will try to use with my classes each year, it promotes important conversations and teaches students how to communicate thoughtfully and purposefully in both a linguistic and artistic way.