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[av_heading heading=’ BORDERLESS | The magic of radio drama’ tag=’h3′ style=’blockquote modern-quote’ size=” subheading_active=’subheading_below’ subheading_size=’15’ padding=’10’ color=” custom_font=”]
BY RHODA GARZON-CAMPILLAN
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Tuesday, April 11, 2017
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A LOT OF pedagogies could serve as a teaching strategy. One channel that caught my attention is radio drama.
I have been teaching radio drama for quite some time now and as always, I enjoy the experience of hearing different stories packaged as such. In my class this semester, the final output of the students is radio drama based on various societal issues.
The challenge I posed to the students is to produce a live radio drama. It is quite difficult because radio dramas are usually canned productions. When we say canned, it means recorded earlier.
Students are also tasked to create at least three manual sound effects that will go together with the digital sound effects. The students must choose appropriate music to enhance the mood of the story or serve as transition.
One important aspect of radio drama is crafting a story with unique characters, interesting conflict, and an end with a resolution. The radio script needs to be descriptive as possible because radio drama is the theater of the mind. You as the listener is left to imagine what the radio drama is conveying. You will notice that when you listen, the characters usually describe what they are doing.
I was surprised with the outputs of the students on the day of the production. They were able to pull off the activity. The radio talents portrayed multiple characters. One group’s issue is rape, which in my opinion is a very sensitive topic. But despite the setbacks, they were able to produce their radio drama entitled Sa Diin ang Hustisiya.
In our Best of Practices seminar, in which I was one of the speakers, I emphasized that radio drama is not only for AB Communication students. Teachers from other courses could also use this teaching strategy in their classes. Literature and Humanities classes could make use of this strategy especially if they want the students to understand stories tackled in class. In radio drama, you could go down the level of the students. You can tailor-fit the message to convey it effectively to the students.
Radio drama is fun to do and students can learn a lot of values when making one. They could learn the value of teamwork especially if they are divided into groups and they need to work altogether to come up with an output.
Another one is patience. Choosing appropriate music and sound effects and writing dialogues needs a lot of patience. It is not easy to scout for music and sound effects that will best fit your story.
Next is ingenuity. When you make a radio drama, you need to be resourceful in terms of talents that you choose and story that you write. It should be something original and out of the box. But it should not lose its beauty of simplicity; that it could still touch the hearts of the listeners regardless of the topic of choice.
A lot of teaching strategies could inspire students. As a teacher, you must never stop looking for novel strategies. In other words, as a teacher you need to keep on learning; learning never stops as long as you are in the teaching profession.
Teaching is a laborious job. However, if you love what you are doing, things no longer become laborious work; it becomes easy and smooth./PN
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