Transforming Teaching and Learning with Active and Dramatic Approaches

Engaging Students Across the Curriculum

Brian Edmiston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136299391
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2014!

How can teachers transform classroom teaching and learning by making pedagogy more socially and culturally responsive, more relevant to students' lives, and more collaborative? How can they engage disaffected students in learning and at the same time promote deep understanding though high-quality teaching that goes beyond test preparation?

This text for prospective and practicing teachers introduces engaging, innovative pedagogy for putting active and dramatic approaches to learning and teaching into action. Written in an accessible, conversational, and refreshingly honest style by a teacher and professor with over 30 years' experience, it features real examples of preschool, elementary, middle, and high school teachers working in actual classrooms in diverse settings. Their tales explore not only how, but also why, they have changed the way they teach. Photographs and stories of their classroom practice, along with summarizing charts of principles and strategies, both illuminate the critical, cross-curricular, and inquiry-based conceptual framework Edmiston develops and provide rich examples and straightforward guidelines that can support readers as they experiment with using active and dramatic approaches to dialogue, inquiry, building community, planning for exploration, and authentic assessment in their own classrooms.

Chapter 1
Be Active and Dramatic in Dialogue to Transform Learning

To live means to participate in dialogue: to ask questions, to heed, to respond, to agree, and so forth. In this dialogue a person participates wholly and throughout his whole life: with his eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, with his whole body and deeds. He invests his entire self in discourse …

(Bakhtin, 1984, p. 293)

People are in dialogue. The people in the following photographs are attending to one another, making meaning together about a topic of importance to them as they respond to what the other has just said and done. They are listening carefully to one another, to find out what the other is feeling and thinking about an event that concerns them. All are deeply engaged in a task with a shared goal. All are communicating both verbally and nonverbally though neither pair shares the same first language.

Photograph 1.1 shows teachers, who work in different countries with students of different ages, struggling to author words that an administrator would understand. They are trying to explain why active and dramatic words and movement in the classroom can be transformational for learning. Photograph 1.2 shows people collaboratively working out how to use a stethoscope to listen to the breath and heartbeat of an injured man.

The photographs show people being physically, mentally, and socially active while also being dramatic. The two adults have been taking turns imagining that one is the principal of their school. The adult and child are in the midst of pretending that someone has hurt his head badly and needs help.

The photographs show teachers and learners. When I was a young teacher I would have looked at these photographs differently. In identifying the child as a student I would have positioned him as the only learner. Now I see people as learners when they are making meaning together, and people as teachers when they are making a difference in someone

Photograph 1.1 Adults Dialogue.

Photograph 1.2 Adult and Child Dialogue.

else’s learning. When I was starting out in the classroom, I believed that differences in age and social role created a significant divide between teachers and students. Now I know that whatever our age, in dialogue we can author meaning together. Whatever our given social role we may adopt other roles when we dramatize events, allowing us to imagine the world, our social position, and our possible lives quite differently. As adults there is much we can learn from young people about how to be active and dramatic while learning and teaching.

Over the years I have developed theoretical understanding in dialogue with the ideas of people whose written and practical work I value extensively and to whom I refer throughout this book. No one has been more significant for me, as a scholar of dialogue than the Russian philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin (1981; 1984; 1986; 1990; 1993), whom I cite above and whose theories are central to this book.

Bakhtin is clear that without participation in dialogue we must accept other people’s “ready-made truths” as explanations of life and our potential voice in the world rather than grow in our understanding by developing meaning in discourse with other people: “truth is born between people collectively searching” (1984, p. 110). In this book I share some of the growing ‘truths’ about teaching and learning that I’ve discovered and lived throughout my ongoing search with people of all ages.

Following Bakhtin, I aim to place dialogue at the heart of both active and dramatic approaches to teaching and learning about topics, texts, the world, and our selves. Dialogue is active when meaning is made continually with young people rather than expecting them passively to receive or regurgitate information or ideas. Dialogue becomes dramatic when we create understanding as if we were elsewhere or were other people, especially when we imagine we are characters in stories or people referred to in any narrative text.

Dialogue with students is now my primary practice as a teacher. I greet young people, get to know them, listen to them, communicate, explore narratives, imagine together, develop understandings, and then say farewell, all in dialogue. It’s through dialogue that we can organize, question, joke, instruct, and change what we’re doing. Without dialogue I would be left lecturing in monologues and learning nothing about the content, other people, or my self as a teacher.

Another central influence on my thinking and practice has been Dorothy Heathcote (Johnson & O’Neill, 1984; Heathcote & Bolton, 1995 ). Heathcote was one of the pioneers of using dramatic approaches for educational purposes; her philosophy, practice, and theorizing pervades my understanding of dramatic pedagogy.¹ She stresses that adults and young people share the same capability to imagine and dramatize: “the ability of humans to ‘become somebody else’, to ‘see how it feels’ … to ‘put yourself in my shoes’ [is a capacity that] humans employ naturally and intuitively all their lives” (1969/1984, p. 54).²

My ideas have also been informed by dialogue with theorists and practitioners in other fields. For example, the cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner (1987) characterizes a core process of understanding in which our “actual minds” create “possible worlds” as actively making meaning about oral or written narratives and the ideas contextualized by them explicitly and by inference. Bruner suggests we understand life and texts in terms of our own and others’ stories. Using social imagination, any fictional or factual text may begin to come alive mentally and socially for a group when people talk, move, and interact collaboratively as if they are living within an event in the world of the narrative. This is what I call dramatic learning. Similar resonances arise in the work of the anthropologist Dorothy Holland (Holland et al., 1998). Holland stresses that, like fictional story worlds, the “real world” can be understood in terms of our experiences and understanding of shared narratives and that our social position in relation to those narratives is socially and culturally co-constructed; this is what I call active learning.

In active and dramatic dialogue about narrative worlds people not only make meaning about texts but also may change their understanding of who they are, and who they might become, both in the classroom and in the world beyond the school. Using Bakhtin’s global concept, teachers as well as students may become more aware of their “authorship” (Morson & Emerson, 1990, pp. 123–268). When I author meaning I improvise acts that can affect my social position and understanding of my self in the world, which from a Bakhtinian viewpoint, as Deborah Hicks (1996) argues, is at the core of learning.

Learning is making meaning and authoring understanding in dialogue

I use the following terms as broad synonyms: authoring, creating, constructing, developing, and making. Similarly, I use understanding, meaning, and knowing interchangeably. I tend to use ‘meaning-making’ to refer to learning in-the-moment and ‘authoring understanding’ to describe the longer-term process of creating conceptual understanding.

The terms ‘utterance’ and ‘words’ foreground verbal dialogue whereas ‘act’, ‘action,’ and ‘deed’ highlight related non-verbal movement. Because the processes of learning are social practices learning may also be characterized as dialogic, coauthoring, co-creating, or the co-construction of meaning and understanding.

When I taught a week-long class for graduate and undergraduate students at The Ohio State University in June 2011, my teaching, and the teachers’ learning, was active and often dramatic. Over that week, the sixteen practicing, former full-time, and pre-service teachers, and myself engaged in extended dialogue about an essential inquiry question: “How and why might you use active and dramatic approaches for teaching in your preschool-college classrooms?”

To make our learning more authentic and substantive I wanted students to learn through direct practical work with young people. To this end, during the week we worked with two groups; one a group from a local middle school and the other a group of preschoolers. Later in this chapter I will describe what happened when the middle level students came to class with their teacher. First, I will look at the work with the preschool children.

One morning, in collaboration with Amy Rush, a teacher in our university childcare center who was a graduate student in the class, I led an hour-long session at the center with eighteen three- and four-year-old children and their adult caregivers. About half of the children came from five different countries beyond the United States.

In dialogue with very young people, many of whom did not speak English as their first language, the children authored meaning about this simple, though not simplistic, text:

Jack and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water.
Jack fell down, and broke his crown
And Jill came tumbling after.

Up Jack got and home did trot
As fast as he could caper.
He went to bed to mend his head
With vinegar and brown paper.

Amy and I had met in advance of working with the preschool children in order to agree on curricular goals. These were related to an appropriate early childhood academic concept, why people need water, and a core social practice, how and why people help one another. Additionally, from a literacy perspective we had a particular learning objective: we wanted the children to recite and form some understanding about the Jack and Jill nursery rhyme that none of the children had previously encountered. Our planning and teaching were guided by the following inquiry questions: why might Jack and Jill have needed water, and how could we help heal Jack’s head?

For nearly an hour, in a sequence of tasks the children dialogued about a narrative event: Jack went up a hill and hurt his head when he fell down. The following photographs illustrate one moment of dialogue about five minutes after we first met. Photograph 1.3 shows Amy and me actively showing and narrating the actions of the people that we are both imagining. As we recite the first stanza of the nursery rhyme, Amy-as-Jill and I-as-Jack fall down as we each pretend to hold a pail of water.

In Photographs 1.4 and 1.5, the children can be seen responding as everyone embodies and collectively recites the first two lines of the rhyme.

Photograph 1.3 Amy-as-Jill and Brian-as-Jack.

Photograph 1.4 Jack and Jill Went Up the Hill.

Photograph 1.5 Jack Fell Down.

People Dialogue with Words and Deeds

In the classroom, as the story of these preschoolers demonstrates, dialogue is not simply talking, but rather back-and-forth substantive meaning-making between two or more people whose intended action may involve non-verbal and well as verbal communication. Everyone was moving while talking. Dialogue is active meaning-making using words and/or deeds. Dialogue is dramatic when people act and communicate as if they are other people and/or as if they are elsewhere. Everyone was pretending to go up a hill to get water. When people dialogue they create understanding as they choose to act and communicate about something important to them. The children loved pretending to carry water and fall down.

Bakhtin assumes that dialogue always involves both verbal and nonverbal aspects of communication working together. He refers to “utterances” as “links in a chain of speech communication” (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 84). Yet an utterance is never just the words spoken but always accompanies, or substitutes for, a physical deed. When teachers say, “Use your words,” they want children to use verbal language but the words still affect the person being addressed. Likewise, when they say, “Show us what you mean,” they don’t mean to stop using words. As Josh, one of the children, approached me, I was unsure what he wanted. I asked, “What’s happening?” He said, “water everywhere” as he moved his whole body while pretending to fall down and spill water on me. I giggled, acted surprised, and we repeated our exchange again, and again.

People communicate verbally in, and understand, utterances. We ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Brief Contents
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Be Active and Dramatic in Dialogue to Transform Learning
• 2 Build Community
• 3 Plan for a Journey of Exploration
• 4 Teach for Authentic and Critical Inquiry
• 5 Be Tactical and Strategic to Transform Teaching
• 6 Assess What You Value in Achievement
• 7 Embrace the Complexity and Simplicity of Dramatic Pedagogy
• Afterword
• References
• Index