Into the Story 2

More Stories! More Drama!

Carole Miller, Juliana Saxton

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781783205745
• eBook ISBN: 9781783205769
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performance Art

Following the first collection of story drama structures, Into the Story 2: More Stories! More Drama! presents a well-argued approach to the value of children's picture books as a way to look at contemporary issues of social justice while building connections that promote a literacy that is multi-dimensional. Story drama structures offer teachers opportunities for the rich conversations and deep reflections that foster habits of mind critical for life in the twenty-first century. This new volume, piloted internationally over the last decade, will become an invaluable resource for uncovering curricula in ways that are fresh and innovative for students and teachers of all levels.

Chapter One

Towards a Humanizing Curriculum

Drama can be thought of as a metaphor for bending time and space to create a space for exploratory interaction, dialogues, and representations out of which new thoughts, ideas and ways of looking/seeing can emerge.

(Robyn Ewing, 2010, p. 40)

This new text, like Into the Story: Language in Action through Drama (2004), comprises a series of story drama structures that use picture books as their contexts for exploration. Picture books build connections to learning experiences for students, and when coupled with drama strategies promote a literacy that is three-dimensional, engaging students through mind, body and feeling. Story drama structures provide the integrating process frequently lacking in a fragmented and often overloaded curriculum; they go beyond the short term and present a cohesive approach to learning. It is the specificity of the drama strategies that makes these lessons unique and encourages teachers to embrace drama pedagogy as holistic education in its richest sense.

Since the publication of Into the Story, story drama structures have had wide recognition both nationally and internationally. This book brings together a second collection that uncovers curriculum in ways that are new for students and teachers both experienced and inexperienced in drama. It not only addresses such subjects as language arts, social studies and environmental education, it also explores areas of the “hidden” curriculum; for example, inter and intra personal communication, ethics and social justice. Each structure has been piloted with pre-service teachers and with teachers and students in elementary, middle school and secondary classrooms. We do not provide a synopsis of each story as there are many children’s literature websites that provide a diversity of synopses and reviews of the stories included here. We do, however, provide the rationale for our choice of each book that should enable teachers to make their own decisions based on the content, themes and learning described. As in our first text, these stories have been organized with the developmental level of the students in mind. However, we have deliberately chosen not to be grade specific. While you might not consider The Follower as appropriate for middle or upper level students, it can be a wonderful source for advanced students who are working in media studies. The structures are open to adaptation. We know of middle-school students working with Woolvs in the Sitee while Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge is a wonderful resource for senior citizens and as a part of local community activities. These stories seem to be effective with people of all ages, addressing the many forms of social languages that may be represented both inside classrooms and beyond.

“Those Shoes” was hands-down the best drama workshop I have run thus far. Consumerism and materialism are issues I feel strongly about, and I found the structure really made it a relevant issue to my students. I took your plan and broke it into two lessons with some minor tweaks. Both lessons ran almost 90 minutes, but it felt like 15. There is so much variety that the kids were constantly engaged, and the final discussion was so great. Almost everyone shared a story about being excluded, or feeling ashamed about not having name-brand clothes. I also lent my plans to a colleague across the hall, and he had equally positive things to say about it.

Shaun Sarton,

pre-service teacher, 2015

Why Do We Need Another Book?

The continuing responses to Into the Story tell us that many teachers are looking for innovative methods for teaching critical thinking, literacy and curriculum integration and that these structures provide a way of working that fulfils mandated curriculum, stimulates learning and generates interest and engagement in their students. Because the structures, while clear, are not confining, teachers themselves are comfortable using them.

The matrix enables both experienced and novice teachers and facilitators to adapt or to create new structures using stories that their students enjoy and are applicable to their own classroom contexts. For some, they apply the drama strategies independently in order to open up areas of curriculum where a human dimension may be critical to understanding.

As well, the nature of picture books is changing; many of the most effective are looking at the issues that face us in today’s world. As curricula change and our understanding of how we learn expands, we see the value of drama as an imperative pedagogy for engaging learners. These new stories have a wide appeal that, by putting students at the centre of the text, ask them to see possible worlds from a multiplicity of perspectives, to encounter ideas and dilemmas that demand empathic attention, and to grapple with things that matter. Story dramas that are built around current concerns allow participants, in Maxine Greene’s (1995) words, “to name what we see around us—the hunger, the passivity, the homelessness, the ‘silences’. . . . [I]t requires imagination” she writes,” “to be conscious of them, to find our own lived worlds lacking because of them” (p. 111). Many of the stories we have included are a means of generating rich conversations about abstract concepts that are often only situated in textbooks.

We are all aware that the isolating nature of technology, concerns about safety, privacy and the breakdown of social and cultural traditions, is changing relationships with and within our worlds. Classrooms have now become one of the few places where people can gather together to discover and practice the skills of social literacy, a term that for us encompasses many of the ideas that lie at the heart of the hidden curriculum—the unspoken rules of social encounter that are defined and reinforced within school contexts. It is there that students working together “hitchhike on each other’s ideas and modify and extend [their] own meaning making” (Booth, 2014, np). The dynamic make-up of our classrooms, students’ diversity and cultural contributions provide a rich context that challenge each participant to negotiate ways of becoming members of a classroom community that stands as a microcosm of the larger world. “If we begin to see things differently in our drama and theatre work,” Jonothan Neelands (2006) tells us, “if we behave differently, if we see how we can ‘act’ upon the imagined worlds of our drama, then perhaps we also begin to see how the ‘real’ world can be ‘acted on’ and changed” (p. 55). Drama enables us to interrogate our learning, own it and make connections among, between and beyond ourselves.

The issues and events of this new century and its first decades have brought an increased attention to what is going on in schools. Although much of that interest is described as the need to maintain our competitive edge in learning, in reality it is driven by anxiety over the economic fragility many so-called “first world” nations are now facing, along with the serious questions of responsibility to others in the world who face greater challenges. Educators have become more aware of the centrality of imagination, collaboration and creativity as integral to growing a more effective and healthy sense of nationhood. “Creativity is a step beyond imagination because it requires that you actually do something rather than lie around thinking about it” (Robinson, 2009, p. 71). In a time when creativity, innovation and much of our economic health is dependent upon our abilities to communicate, and schools are increasingly seen as the laboratories for democratic life, “the quantity and quality of talk in the classroom . . . is an important part of preparing citizens to find and use their voices” (Bloem, Klooster, & Preece, 2008, p. 6). In drama, as John O’Toole (2015) points out, we both talk and walk: “we can play with reality to create alternative fictional realities that we can try out through the pretence . . . [to] ask previously unthought-of questions” (p. 119).

How Does Drama Work?

Drama reconfigures space and, in doing so, shifts the relationships of power and knowing. A visit to any school shows us that most of our classrooms are still organized within a proscenium relationship that has been around in theatre for at least the past three centuries. This mode of learning, characteristic of 90% of primary/elementary classroom instructional time in schools in North America, disconnects us from ourselves and those around us (Pianta, Belsky, Houts, & Morrison, 2007). Drama education is teaching “in the round”, and because it is a collective process, it is often hard to spot the teacher. The circle is fluid with participants and teacher moving in and out as they respond to the situations.

Context

Because a story drama structure is always situated within a context that demands all kinds of talk, it offers possibilities for understanding content in ways that are constructive and collaborative because learning is embodied, enacted and social. Think of a context as a container that holds the meaning. It includes not only the story line (plot) but also the situations, thoughts, feelings and points of view of the people in that story who are engaged in working their way through the conditions in which they find themselves. Context “demands that we think it from the inside rather than to think over and about it” (Johnson & O’Neill, 1984, p. 142), so drama activities are always placed inside some kind of human dilemma. Working in context demands a different way of thinking and planning because most importantly, context is the site for the collective building of dramatic action and the making of meaning. Rather than each activity being linearly accessed (as in a plot), context enables participants, through manipulating time, place and roles, to explore the implications of situations they think significant.

Underlying everything Dorothy Heathcote has given us was her concern for things substantive. “Do children do things that matter?” she once asked, “and in doing those things, do they know that they matter too?” (O’Connor, 2012, p. 22). A context is worth investigating when it is rich with possibilities. For example, the pretext offered in Mary Ellery (Morgan & Saxton, 2006) is a very, very short story about space travel. Those few lines become a drama as students collectively discover and build the questions that lead them to imagine the story within the story that effects the lives of all those who dared to venture. Only by placing themselves in the future can they explore the past and that requires participants to bring their own personal contexts and feelings into play.

Drama educates through embodied learning in a multiplicity of metalanguages—what the joint declaration of the UNESCO World Arts Conference (2007) calls “the humanizing languages of the arts” (p. 2). A “humanizing curriculum [is one] in which more attention is given to developing compassion, empathy, tolerance, highly developed interpersonal skills and respect for difference” (Neelands, 2010, p. 125). It teaches students “many of the skills that they need to be everyday participants in our diverse and complex literate society” (O’Mara, 2008, p. 159) by exploring human behaviours and experiences in social circumstances under fictional pressure. This exploration becomes the material with which the metaphorical worlds are woven.

Fiction and the metaphoric world

Metaphor is a foundational construct of our art form; in theatre and drama we are always working in the “as if” fictional world of the narrative. In whatever artistic genre we are engaged, the artist, Jerome Bruner (1986) reminds us, “creates possible worlds through the metaphoric transformation of the ordinary” (p. 49). Metaphors, perhaps because they are experienced physically and through the senses, offer new and different ways to experience life—at once clearly understood and, at the same time, ambiguous.

Because almost all stories are concerned with relationships between people, understanding stories “entails an understanding of people and how their goals, beliefs and emotions interact with their behaviours” (Mar, Oatley, Hirsh, dela Paz, & Peterson, 2006, p. 696). It should not surprise us that as we engage with the metaphoric world, we may see changes in perspectives and attitudes because real-world processing and how we process stories are closely related (p. 697). Djikic, Oatley, Zoeterman, and Peterson (2009) write that it is the “quality of art-induced emotions—their complexity, depth, range, and intensity—that potentially facilitate the process of . . . change” (p. 28). Through the embodied metaphoric acts of the imagination in drama and theatre we create internal models that result in increased social and empathic awareness.

I taught Rose Blanche to my Children’s Theatre class and Theatre One. Both classes loved it. It was the very first time any of them had any Holocaust education—these are international kids: Americans, Saudis, Egyptians, Pakistanis, Malaysians, Koreans, Canadians—a huge mix. This was a pivotal moment for them all—I have never seen them so moved. Sometimes I was afraid to speak—I just let them speak.

Charlotte Harvey,

experienced international teacher, 2014

Conditional language

Another interesting realization is the relationship of language to the fictional “as if” world we explore through drama. Creative imagining can be encouraged by the use of conditional language (“might”, “may”, “perhaps”, “possibly”) not only in our instructions but also in prompting participants’ thinking and reflecting (Chanowitz & Langer, 1981). The research of Ellen Langer and her colleagues (1987, 1989) into the relationship between what they refer to as “conditional learning” and mindfulness has made us more aware of the significance of that kind of instructional language in drama. The use of the conditional creates a sense of uncertainty that helps us to become more aware of new things (Siegel, 2007). The conditional helps students to recognize that the nature of the world in both fiction and reality is always to be fluid. Much of the language we offer in these story drama structures is designed specifically to keep learners in the active role of mental processing as they make sense of content and its context. For example (from “I longs for bloo skys”), using the strategy of “spectrum of difference”:

In role as a member of this community, think about a word or phrase that most clearly reflects where you, yourself, stand in response to Ben’s call. You may use your own words or something that you’ve read that speaks more directly to what you are thinking and feeling. As you make this choice, you need to think very carefully about what is happening in the city around you.

Where do the dangers lie? What may be the consequences of joining Ben? How might your choice affect your family? Your own career? And the safety of those you love?

As Richard Sennett (2012) points out, this is the kind of language that is used by diplomats because it “open[s] up a space for experiment; tentativeness issue[s] an invitation to others to join in” (p. 22).

The Empathic Process

Part of mental processing involves the potential for students developing and refining their empathic responses. For many years, drama educators have been claiming that “walking in another’s shoes” is a powerful means of developing empathy. Our research has shown that that is not necessarily so. Drama requires that we take on the role of another, imagining what it must be like to be someone else by “being able to infer the full range of mental states (beliefs, desires, intentions, imagination, emotions, etc.) that...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter One: Towards a Humanizing Curriculum
• Chapter Two: And Quick as That Based on The Follower by Richard Thompson
• Chapter Three: Memories for Miss Nancy Based on Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge by Mem Fox
• Chapter Four: New Boots for Winter Based on Those Shoes by Maribeth Boelts
• Chapter Five: I’m Too Old for a Trike Now Based on Tricycle by Elisa Amado
• Chapter Six: Now, Write! Based on The Composition by Antonio Skármeta
• Chapter Seven: The Wealth of the Sea Based on The Fish Princess by Irene Watts
• Chapter Eight: Mary Ellery, Traveler in Space Based on a text created by Norah Morgan
• Chapter Nine: A Piece of Bread Based on Rose Blanche by Roberto Innocenti
• Chapter Ten: Aqua Pura Based on Beneath the Surface by Gary Crew
• Chapter Eleven: I Longs for Bloo Skys Based on Woolvs in the Sitee by Margaret Wild
• Recommended Reading
• Bibliography
• Glossary of Drama Strategies
• Appendix: Making a Story Drama Structure
• Index