Techniques from a thespian - notes from a conference presentation

I attended a session at WILU 2011 in Regina last week that infused acting techniques into the practices of instructional librarians. The speaker, Sarah Polkinghorne, started by making the distinction between entertaining your audience as opposed to directly connecting and engaging your audience. There seems to be a lot of focus on entertainment in modern teaching pedagogy, yet the presenter suggested that "entertainment teaching" is actually rooted in the methodolgy of traditional lecture format as the focus is still on inputting knowledge into your participants.

She suggested that in acting the content cannot be seperated from the body, that there is a physical presence of the content. Teaching is ultimately not about the teacher, it is the message that you are trying to convey. Modern classroom focus on more collaboration, more discourse and actively learning through participation.