124080 VK BEd 08a.3: VK Literature and Language Education (2025S)

The theatre is a vibrant space for children and young adults to explore issues that shape their lives and challenge their sense of self and the future. Reading or watching actors on stage act out plays about topics like mobbing, social anxieties in school, gender and sexuality, climate change or disability can be an immersive and moving experience for young people that can be meaningfully integrated in the EFL classroom.

This VK will explore how teachers of English can work with dramatic texts in the EFL classroom and how reading, analysing and acting out plays with your students can productively unite the teaching of a foreign language with issues of literary genres and socially relevant issues that shape young people's lives.

The class consists of three thematic blocks:
(1) In a first thematic block at the beginning of the semester, we will explore the basics of theatre pedagogy in a workshop with theatre professionals from the Vienna-based "Theater der Jugend" (https://www.tdj.at/theaterpaedagogik/tdj-du). Here, we develop a toolbox of methods and activities for acting with students in the classroom.
(2) In a second block, we read and discuss three plays for learners between the age of 12 and 19. The plays cover issues of disability, discrimination faced by queer teenagers, racial and gender inequalities, or they challenge traditional narratives such as the fairy tale. Two of the plays feature teachers or are set in school.
(3) In the third block, participants develop their own short classroom activities based on one of the three plays, using the toolbox from the first workshop to create an acting activity for their students. In peer-to-peer teams, participants give feedback on each other's activities and lesson plans. We then try out, feedback and further develop these activities in a second workshop with the theatre professionals from Theater der Jugend.

In the class, participants therefore reflect on themselves on three levels:
1) as prospective teachers of English at Austrian schools (in their development of theatre pedagogical teaching activities and in the peer-to-peer teams that feedback and develop each other's lesson plans),
2) as performers of dramatic texts (by carrying out the activities of their peers and adopting the perspective of their students),
3) as academics who reflect on the plays and classroom activities with each other and with the workshop leaders, learning to link literary studies and theatre pedagogy.