Radio Story: Drama in the Critical Literacy Classroom

Radio Story: Drama in the Critical Literacy Classroom

Kent State University

Kent, Ohio
Abstract

This paper describes a workshop in which students learn to use critical thinking skills within the framework of a drama workshop. The exercises in the program are intended to give the new teachers practical skills for incorporating the daily newspapers in lesson planning. Samples of student products are presented as evidence of the ways in which students collaborate, negotiate, and use their skills as organizers of information to create new literary pieces. This hands-on approach to building skills that enhance the awareness of social dynamics and the inequality that is inherent in most classroom relationships can be used as a tool for teachers who are interested in developing classrooms that function to enhance social justice values through the process of critical thinking pedagogy.

I have been training preservice high-school teachers for the last six years. My main course is called Reading and Writing in Adolescence and Adulthood. In this course I work to help the young teachers understand that symbols can be used to communicate information. For example, we look at words, pictures, artefacts, museum exhibits, and music as forms of expression that we can make meaning with and decode for messages. In the effort to make this practical in their lives as teachers who will be working with adolescents in high school, I involve them in workshops where they gain experience communicating with art objects, graphic novels, drama activities, and poetry performance techniques that they can teach in their own classrooms.

Beach and Myers (2001) suggest that we ask students to look into the way that symbols (i.e., words, action, and pictures) help create systems that mediate our world as we experience it. Rosenblatt (1978) would call this world view an aesthetic approach to reading the world. I encourage teachers to develop communication skills beyond reading, writing, speaking, listening, and signing, and to include the visual, kinaesthetic, and aural arts to facilitate success within and beyond the classroom (Doig & Sargent, 1996; Harste, 1994; Reif, 1992). My hope is to help teachers develop a critical stance to forms of communication so they learn to appreciate the modes of expression that adolescents bring into the high-school classroom.

In my teacher training workshops I have been explicitly working to address Giroux's statement about literacy as an act of being "present and active in the struggle for reclaiming one's voice, history, and future" (1988, p. 155). I make my efforts accessible through an examination of the role of writing and reading in the daily lives of my students. My workshop activities have been informed by the critical theory lens theorists have offered to address issues of power and agency in the process of becoming literate. Seminars or workshops on critical literacy are not likely to address the practical issues of building an awareness in teachers that is informed by a critical analysis of societal issues that impact their teaching and their students. While there is a lot of talk about how power/knowledge relationships can be critiqued and transformed among the practitioners in the critical literacy field there are very few theorists and teachers who discuss the ways and means of accelerating students with reading and writing (Bomer & Bomer, 2003; Heffernan & Lewison, 2003; Lensmire, 2000; Luke & Freebody, 1997, 1999; Vasque, 2003).

In a paper presented at the National Reading Conference in 2005, Rogers and Kramer stated that they believed critical literacy is necessary for adult beginning literacy learners because such students are the ones most likely to bear the most oppression by traditional forms of literate and social structures (Ellsworth, 1989; Perry, Steele, & Hilliard, 2003; Richardson, 2003; Rogers, 2003). The authors recommend an approach that combines teaching for literacy acceleration within critical frameworks to remedy some of the ills that traditional literacy sites are bound to nurture. The authors remind us that teaching for social justice focuses on power and unequal relationships as the site where we must do the work of education for liberation. A critical approach, therefore, includes an analysis and critique of systems of oppression be they race, class, gender, sexual orientation, or abelism; but it also includes tools for social change and action that improves community well-being.

Brookfield (2004) and Cervaro and Wilson (2000) take the stance that adult literacy education is defined by the struggle over power and knowledge. Considering that power and knowledge are never neutral but are defined by those who have access to resources, it is easy to apply this lens to the secondary school teacher training environment. A natural progression from that trend of analysis is a consideration of the ways in which educators can develop practices that encourage the redistribution of power/knowledge in relationships within and beyond secondary school classrooms and teacher education sites. Authors such as Brookfield (2005), Demetrion ( 2005), Deneger (2001), Heaney (1992), and St. Clair and Sandlin (2004) call for critical literacy pedagogy in adult education. As in the secondary education teacher training sites, such calls are increasingly silenced by federal reform efforts that promote a technical, skill-driven view of literacy and education (Rogers & Kramer, 2005).

Drama, another means through which we learn to use and interpret symbols, is an excellent tool to use in the classroom that uses critical literacy as its organizing theme. This kinesthetic form of communication assists in: (1) creating "an experience through which students may come to understand human interactions, empathize with other people, and internalize alternative points of view" (Wagner, 1988, p. 5), and, (2) developing understanding and learning through drama rather than "some finished product such as a well-mounted play" (Heinig, 1993, p. 22).

Wilhem and Edmiston (1998) defined drama in the classroom as a process kind of drama in which there is no audience or pre-written script. Teachers and students take on the roles necessary to create a story and solve a problem. Since drama requires a collaborative action through the cooperation of groups and peers, the whole classroom works to merge their imaginations for one purpose. Even though the students’ interests, research, and creation construct the drama process, the teachers play an important role in facilitating, shaping, and delegating the chores. The focus on building tools for examination of power roles and the distribution of knowledge among the characters in the play are a natural part of the construction of the drama by the students.