Expression, Confidence & Community Through Theatre

With a background in theatre and scenic arts, Pauline encouraged our students to be bold, courageous, and expressive in new and exciting ways.

Pauline joined us as a Creative Workshops volunteer, and stayed in the camps for March and April.

Working closely with all four age levels, she combined music, theatre, creativity, confidence-building, and English-language development

Theatre & Expression

Pauline led a wide range of theatre and creative expression workshops designed to build confidence, imagination, teamwork, communication, and emotional awareness. These objectives were tailored to the unique setting of working with refugee youth, and were curated with thoughtfulness and intention to best uplift our students.

Some of her classroom activities included improvisation games, image theatre, soundscapes, object theatre, movement exercises, role-play, tongue twisters, and collaborative scene creation. In one workshop, children used imagination and everyday classroom objects to invent scenes and stories, like tea ceremonies and cookouts!

Here, you can see some of our level 3 students acting out a scene together.

A major focus of her theatre work at Desert Voicebox was anti-bullying and emotional expression.

Students explored themes such as exclusion, peer pressure, violence, and empathy through performance exercises and devised scenes. Pauline used theatre techniques such as “Image Theatre,” “Thought Tracking,” and collaborative scene-building to help students physically and emotionally explore different perspectives.

The Level 4 anti-bullying performance included scenes set on playgrounds, in schools, and bathrooms, portraying different forms of bullying and students learning to stand up for themselves and others.

Alongside our music teacher Nicole, Pauline helped prepare and organize two major student performances.

Festival Teatro Escolar Sáhara (FETESA)

During Pauline’s time with us, our students also enjoyed participating in and attending FETESA, a Spanish-supported inter-camp theatre competition featuring schools from across the refugee camps. Fetesa also collaborates with libraries in the Saharawi refugee camp and carries out an internship with the Master of Applied Theatre programme at the University of Valencia in Spain.

Our students proudly took to the stage, alongside Pauline, and we couldn’t be more proud of their performances.

Their performance won first place in the competition!

Our students shined with a memorable performance demonstrating the acting, confidence, and pronunciation work they practiced during rehearsals with Pauline. It was an English-language piece about political unrest, truth, courage, peace, and resistance, concluding with the song Zombies in the Air, a piece written in past a semester by older students with veteran volunteer, Anastasia Olenik.

Musicality & Piano Lessons

One of Pauline’s main projects was providing small-group and individual piano lessons each week, helping students begin learning melodies, rhythm, hand positioning, note recognition, and two-handed playing.

Students learned and practiced songs including Alle meine Entchen, a German children’s song used to introduce scales and rhythm, Oh When the Saints Go Marching In, Ode to Joy, the Harry Potter theme, and Dance of the Fleas. Pauline also incorporated rhythm games, sight-reading activities, chord work, and ear-training exercises.

Mask Making & Shadow Puppets

Bringing play further into the classroom, students designed and created cardboard puppets to experiment with storytelling. Their performances used light, shadow, and ample imagination. Many students created personal designs, bringing to life guitars, birds, people, and characters with their puppets.

Pauline’s mask and puppetry workshops are both exemplary lessons for Creative Workshops, and embody how much can be done with the limited resources in the camps with the right volunteer’s ingenuity!

Inside the Classroom

Supporting our regular classroom routine is a key part of the Creative Workshop Volunteer role. Being able to integrate into the rhythm of the classroom s helps strengthen lessons and provide support to our teachers. Pauline also lead an installment of our Penpal Programme, organising the English letter-writing exchange with our partnered Italian school.

Part of why our Workshop stay has a minimum time of 4 weeks is to help volunteers truly learn and integrate into the Desert Voicebox classroom, allowing a richer connection with students and teachers both! This also ensures that students with higher support needs can more deeply benefit from an additional educator too.

Picnic Outing

One of the most special events of the Spring semester at Desert Voicebox is our end of the year picnic outing. Our teachers and students pack-up and head out for a shared picnic lunch to commemorate the end of another amazing school year.

This year, the picnic included a field trip to visit a local recycled-plastic workshop that transforms old plastic into furniture and school materials for the camps.