Community Centre
Let all grow and be happy together
This is a family-based community centre and why the Central, East and West fora meeting areas in our Centre, and the café area, are always open to our members. Every Drama Rainbow Education family, including the extended family, make up the membership of our Community Centre.
These people, aged from only a few days up to a hundred- years-old, gather in this small, safe space to relax, talk, share, and participate in the events we organize for them, which creates a community resilience and durability. The annual Long Table Banquet, the “Le Xiang Le Xiang” Parent-Child Evening Concerts, and market events, are important rituals that enables the community to prosper and demonstrate its resilience/durability through shared social activity.
As an Important Parent Partner
Are parents just sitting there with their handsets like smartphone addicts? We want to connect with all our members. We make it our business to fully engage our parents in the development of their children in our Centre which is both challenge and really rewarding. If parents are not happy, how can their children be happy?
Being a parent is the greatest privilege an adult can have. It is also the most responsible and challenging role we can ever take on in life. Parents are vital to our vision for the success of the Centre’s community, and we strive to be a cooperative and inclusive friend to all our parent members, to work together for the betterment of the children’s development. We want to offer support and opportunities for all our parents to engage in this way of learning, to take what is useful about it into their home. We will be a critical friend, however, in the sense that we will work alongside parents to see how we can improve our practice in the Centre. It is our duty to ensure that we remain children-centered, and we owe it to all of our children to put their needs first and foremost and honestly to parents at all times. Being parents takes the rest of our lives, fortunately we are never too old to learn, and learning together is the most rewarding of journeys.
Parents’ Workshops
How adults can be as imaginative as children
In our parents’ workshop the same drama structures used by the DiE Centre to frame the children, with their needs as the foremost consideration, are also employed to frame adult participants. It is important when framing parents in fictional situations, to apply the same methodology: when parents enter the protection of role, for example, the dramatic situation will enable them to directly face those things they often neglect or are unwilling to discuss or avoid in life. The importance of parents’ workshops lies in the protected, safe, experience they offer, rather than aiming to heal or solve problems.
Return to the simplest form of “Togetherness”
Building a real connection in the community
“Le Xiang Le Xiang” Parent-Child Evening Concerts
These concerts attempt to establish a simple but authentic connection within the community; a community that sees, cares for, is aware of, and interacts and shares with each other. We assessed that the best way to do this was to bring parents and children together to create, prepare, and share at a concert. After the presentation, families are encouraged to reflect upon and record their experiences. Whatever the genre of music: traditional folk, pop, classical opera, or blues, every family finds that there is a track that expresses something they can share among themselves and with others in the community through concerts. The emphasis in these concerts is sharing something that is important to the sharers through music, which others can receive and enjoy. The emphasis is on experience not ability. The joy generated enables families to have a sense of ‘arrival’ and of belonging to the community.
A Community of mutual seeing and caring
At home in a safe and warm harbour
The annual Long Table Banquet
Every December 31st, a ‘long table’ is set up in the East, West and of the Drama Rainbow Centre. Parents bring along their favorite dishes, and Drama Rainbow Education provides chopping boards and flour for dumplings. The ritual of making dumplings together, especially for celebratory banquets, is deeply ingrained in Chinese culture. Staff, children, parents, and grandparents then sit around the long table (it needs to be long as we have 200 member families) preparing and then eating a serious meal together. The long table Banquet is the most important annual festival for the Drama Rainbow Education community: it is our New Year’s Eve dinner for our families.
When children enter the world, all traditions and rituals of the community become part of who they are. It is through cultural practice that we learn how to speak and behave; it is an educational medium. We have created a tradition which connects Drama Rainbow Education’s community with the Chinese tradition of long table banquets and the Western celebration of the new year. By eating together we also live together.
Long table
Long table video ,2018
Bringing you into the Drama Rainbow Education Centre
1000 square meters large open space
What does everyone say?
