Witches and What People Think about Them

In drama we continued to explore the subject of “outsiders”, this time focusing on what was going on in the 17th century: the burning of “witches”.As a class we read a poem that was from the point of view of a married man who was having an affair with a woman who the village had condemned as a witch.After reading, analyzing and discussing the poem, we split into small groups to explore how the community felt about this certain woman. I was with Anthony and Sho and together we discussed how our characters were going to react. We decided that Sho and I are a married couple who own a fruit and vegetables and we were not only very religious but also very firm in thinking the woman was a witch.Anthony decided that to put some contrast in our exploration, he would be a farmer who disagreed with us and said “no, she isn't a witch”.We discussed our theories (such as “our cow died when she walked by” “she talks to her cats”) and then moved on to the next exercise. While still in character, the whole class walked around the room and met “other people of the village” and continued to spread rumors and see what the other person had learnt about this woman. I met several different characters, some who refused to give regard to the rumors, some who fervently believed them, and some who quite frankly didn't care.After a few rounds of this, we sat down and used hot seating as a strategy to explore even further the community's thoughts. We hot seated Claudia who was fairly new to the town; she had apparently gone to America and had only recently come back and therefore had no knowledge of the rumors and didn't really care about the town, she showed this with her nonchalant shrugs and relaxed pose.We then hot seated Daniel who played an old man who really didn't care about anything or anyone in this town, he just wanted to clean houses and get money. He wasn't interested in anyone, he didn't go to church, he didn't care about the witch, he would literally do everything and anything