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Integrated Arts Approaches in Education: Dramatic Arts as a Mediator for Literacy

Learning

Alida Anderson

American University, Washington, DC

Linda Krakaur

George Mason University, Arlington, Virginia

Address for correspondence: Dr. Alida Anderson School of Education, Teaching and Health 4400 Massachusetts Ave., NW Washington, DC 20016 Tel.: (202) 885-6214 Fax: (202) 885-1187 Email: aanderso@american.edu

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Abstract

This paper provides integrated arts resources for working with students in the areas of

dramatic arts and literacy learning. First, theoretical background on integrated arts

approaches in drama and literacy skill learning will be presented. The next section is a

review of the literature on methods and materials to support integrated dramatic arts

practices with literacy skills learning. Finally, perspectives on facilitating access,

participation and progress in dramatic arts-based activities as well as barriers to such

implementation will be explored.

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Introduction

Current research on integrated arts approaches (IAA) with young children focuses

on theory and rationale for its use (Cornett, 2007; Palsha, 2001; Research Triangle

Group, 1998). Arts integration is generally defined as the linking of a content area and

an art form; for the purposes of reaching a deeper level of engagement, learning, and

reflection than without the art form. In an integrated classroom, students are working

“with” the art form and “through” the art form to reach academic, social, and personal

goals (Cornett, 2007, p. 13). The use of multiple and diverse materials and methods to

teach concepts and skills precipitates reaching and teaching each and every ‘whole

child’ (McGregor, Tate, & Robinson, 1977, p. 16). Additionally, researchers and

practitioners of IAA with school age students identify the need to assess the impact arts

experiences on students’ developmental and achievement skills (Mason, Steedly, &

Thormann, 2008). Thus, the purpose of this paper is to review information for working

with students with diverse needs (developmental and linguistic) in dramatic arts settings

to foster literacy learning, and to identify next steps for research and practice.

Drama in Education

Drama in education has been recognized as a dynamic methodology for teaching

throughout the world, particularly in Canada, England, Ireland, and Australia. Fisher and

Williams (2000, p. vii) state that “learning to be literate begins with speaking and

listening; speech enables us to describe the world while written speech has a separate

linguistic function – to sustain and order our thinking.” Yet, many students struggle with

these sophisticated developmental processes and require an explicit, engaging, and

holistic approach to learning. Drama in education is the use of drama conventions to

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reach educational objectives, brings students into an “as if” world where actions and

consequences matter (Heathcote, 1995).

Students are provided multiple opportunities to explore, shape, and communicate

their understandings using dramatic elements including: voice, body, and imagination.

Margaret Meek (as cited in Wilhelm, 2002, p. 10) states that “drama strategies make

public the secret things that expert readers know and do so that these usually invisible

strategies will be made physical, external, and concrete.” Process drama is the

exploration of a pre-text (story, current event, poem, picture, etc.) through carefully

crafted dramatic episodes, providing a rich context for students to experience, shape

and reflect on their ideas (O’Neill, 1995). Process drama deepens engagement and

ultimately understanding through fictional episodes where “time” is slowed down and

tension increased. As the focus intensifies, students manifest a variety of roles and

attitudes that allow them to understand and make critical inferences and deductions.

Students have an ongoing opportunity to execute and refine critical literacy skills

(comprehension and production of complex thoughts and ideas) through process drama

(Fisher & Williams, 2000).

Rationale for Connecting Drama and Literacy Skill Learning

For students with disabilities, literacy skill learning (oral and written

comprehension and expression) is an area of considerable need. Students with diverse

learning needs may struggle with understanding and/or producing language, which

impacts their ability to use written language (receptively or expressively). Students from

under resourced environments typically have compromised or limited access to literacy

learning. Students with diverse language backgrounds have confounds with literacy skill

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learning if they do not receive adequate instruction in both their native language

concomitant with English learning. For all of these students, who we refer to as those

with “diverse learning needs”, literacy learning challenges are many. Without

individualized support and attention, these challenges tend to result in students’ lack of

interest in, or motivation for learning.

One way to address this dilemma is through the use of learning activities that

foster engagement through real life experience. Elliot Eisner (2000) proposes that

educational culture shift to one that has a greater focus on becoming than on being by:

(1) placing more value on the imaginative than on the factual; (2) assigning greater

priority to valuing than to measuring; and (3) regarding the quality of the journey as

more educationally significant than the speed at which the destination is reached.

Instruction must be interesting, student centered, and targeted to students’ language

and literacy development to create a rich, social and healthy psychological setting that

fosters positive attitudes about learning (Bear & Barone, 1998). Often referred to as

authentic learning, this approach has been shown to keep students with such

challenges engaged in the process of learning (Eisner, 1998). For example, Gallas

(2003, p. 20) explains that “to read a text with understanding and insight, we must move

inside the text, pulling our life along with us and incorporating the text and our lives into

a new understanding.”

Development of cognition and language. Drama is the mediator between

language and cognition as it enhances higher level thinking skills and is based on

representing experience in symbolic form by requiring participants to look for patterns

and relationships in events (McGregor et al., 1977). Thinking routines for understanding

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drama are similar to those for reading comprehension. Sun (2003) notes that in both

circumstances, students are decoding symbols; they shape ideas based on purpose

and audience, finding meaning, and constructing language. Students also retain and

internalize new understandings through drama as the representations of ideas and

feelings are constructed through the use of the ‘whole body’. It is important to note that

students engaged in drama reconstruct prior knowledge schemas to form increasingly

sophisticated and complex understandings of ideas and events. Students also

experiment with multiple forms of literacy (listening, speaking, reading, writing) while

developing a variety of registers and levels of language according to the demands of the

dramatic context.

Language, Cognition, and Social Development Theories

Theoretical background and rationale of using dramatic arts approaches for

teaching literacy skills to students with diverse needs is based on language, cognition,

and social/emotional development theories. Cognitive and linguistic theories of

development establish the significance of linguistic specificity and its contribution to

children’s development of cognitive and social communication skills. These

perspectives include children’s activities in symbolic representation, assimilation and

accommodation, schema formation, and social participation, all of which influence their

linguistic, cognitive, and social skill development, and their development of literate

language, or linguistic specificity.

Piagetian theory. A Piagetian perspective on children’s cognitive and linguistic

skill development emphasizes the role of mental representation. Children’s shift from

symbolic to ideational forms of representation through language use is closely

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associated with their increasingly specific and “literate” use of language. In Piaget’s

(1926, 1963) preoperational, symbolic, and formal operations stages, children use

increasingly sophisticated and complex language features to represent symbolic and

abstract ideas. Pellegrini (1985) uses Piagetian theory to describe how children

transition from symbolic to ideational stages of representational thought, in which they

increasingly rely on specific language features (i.e., “literate language”) in their

conversations in play contexts. According to Pellegrini, children’s literate language use

reflects their increased mental representation of events and objects. Children in a

preoperational stage of development use symbols or objects to represent reality (e.g., a

child might pretend a doll is a baby); as children progress from preoperational into more

advanced symbolic stages of development, their object representations become

ideational (e.g., the child pretends to be a baby), and they use literate language features

such as mental and linguistic verbs, temporal and causal conjunctions, and elaborated

noun-phrases to convey their ideas in symbolic play. The integration of mental with

linguistic representations offers theoretical basis for the use of dramatic arts activities to

teach literacy skills as drama “purposefully involves children in the enactment of their

imaginings” (Shaw as cited in Day & Norman, 1983, p. 30).

According to Piagetian theory, children’s linguistic specificity also helps them

assimilate and accommodate information from the environment. As children acquire

and integrate information to form increasingly sophisticated mental representations,

they rely on increasingly specific and complex language features. Researchers

examining children’s language use in play contexts have found that children use higher

rates of specific language features in ideational, symbolic play as contrasted with

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constructive or solitary object play (Culatta, 1994; Pellegrini, Galda, Bartini, & Charak,

1998). Van Oers (1998) suggests that children’s linguistic specificity might be linked to

their development of meaningful abstract thinking or the ability to recontextualize

previously experienced events, since they can describe temporal and sequential

information through features such as conjunctive phrases.

Schema theory. Schema theory informs the current discussion of linguistic

specificity and representational forms, with respect to children’s development of

linguistic and cognitive structures. Schemata are the underlying cognitive and linguistic

structures that children develop as they progress from concrete operational thought to

formal operational thought. For instance, during concrete operational stages of schema

development, children use labels and references, and their utterances contain simple

noun- and verb-phrases. As children progress to the formal operational stages of causal

reasoning, their utterances become more specific and include linguistic features such

as conjunctive phrases and as well as elaborated noun- and verb-phrases. In this way,

dramatic arts activities provide a scaffold between mental and linguistic representations.

According to a schematic perspective of linguistic development, children develop skills

through the use of increasingly specific and elaborated features in social and linguistic

interactions, adjusting their existing mental schema to meet the demands of their

environment. This process occurs in dramatic experiences as students use particular

actions and objects to create a fictional world. Bolton (1979, p. 59) notes, “there cannot

be an action without a subjective meaning, that is, some relationship between the action

and the child doing it.”

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Script theory. Script theory, a variation of schema theory informs children’s

development of linguistic specificity and is relevant to dramatic arts. Script theorists

suggest that children’s mental schemata are, in fact, a repertoire of linguistic scripts

with particular features (Schank & Abelson, 1977). As children experience events, they

develop increasingly specific and complex linguistic structures, and in turn, increasingly

complex and elaborated scripts.

Vygotskian Theory

Children experience and use increasingly specific and complex language

features through their symbolic interactions. Vygotsky (1978) states that children

develop in linguistic, cognitive, and social domains through their interaction with their

environment. Children’s optimal learning environment, known as their zone of proximal

development (ZPD) is characterized by the input they receive as being at or above their

own ability level. Pellegrini’s (1985) model is an application of Vygotskian social

interaction theory in explaining how children come to use specific language to meet the

demands of their environment. Pellegrini characterizes children’s specific language use

as their linguistic resolution between two opposing forces of “wish fulfillment (e.g.,

fantasy) and rule-government” in meeting the conventional demands of the environment

(Pellegrini, 1985, p. 82; Pellegrini & Galda, 1998, p. 69). Pellegrini contends that

symbolic dramatic play contexts are in the child’s ZPD for language, social, and

cognitive development, since they allow the child to function in this “wish fulfillment”

stage. Pellegrini’s evidence is based on the finding that preschool age children

understand and use linguistically specific features such as noun phrases, conjunctive

clauses, adverbs, and mental and linguistic verbs most reliably in symbolic play

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contexts with peers. Thus, children’s specific language use supports their symbolic

interactions and is linked to concrete objects in the environment, as well as to more

abstract and socially mediated symbols.

Social-cognitive perspective informs specific language use in dramatic arts

contexts for children with and without disabilities. This perspective draws on Vygotskian

theory to illustrate how children’s language use is related to their development of social

skills (Rubin, Fein, & Vandenberg, 1983; Smilansky, 1968). The Smilansky-Parten

Matrix illustrates the relationship between children’s development of social and

language skills. Rubin and colleagues’ (1983) apply Smilansky’s (1968) play contexts

(e.g., functional/preoperational, constructive, dramatic/symbolic) and Parten’s (1932)

continuum of social participation (i.e., solitary, parallel, and interactive) to characterize

relationships among linguistic, social, and play factors in early childhood. Pellegrini

(1985), and Pellegrini and Galda (1998, p. 60) apply Rubin et al.’s (1983) model to

explain the relationship between specific language use and various play contexts, in

which language use in the play context of dramatic/symbolic play is most highly

associated with the interactive type of social participation, as compared to parallel or

solitary types of social participation, which are not associated with specific language

use.

Review of Methods and Materials

Language-Based Intervention Methods for Studying Linguistic Specificity

Researchers have assessed children’s linguistic specificity through oral literate

language, which comprises elaborated noun phrases, mental and linguistic verbs,

conjunctions, and adverbs (Anderson, 2010; Justice & Kaderavek, 2004; Westby, 1985;

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1994). These authors demonstrate that literate language is a measurable aspect of

preschool age children’s language production. Also, differences in production of literate

language have been found among preschool and school-age populations with and

without disabilities (Anderson, 2010; Greenhalgh, 1999; Greenhalgh & Strong, 2001).

An important aspect of literate language use is that it is related to children’s first

experiences with relaying information in contexts such as story and event retelling. This

has relevance when considering how dramatic arts activities mediate language

production in children.

Play contexts. Pellegrini (1985) uses specific literate language features as the

outcome measure to assess linguistic specificity in preschoolers’ dyadic conversations.

Pellegrini categorizes play contexts based on the structure and function of language

used by participants; this matrix of play categories serves as a set of predictor variables

for frequency of literate language use, on dimensions of (a) conjunctions (temporal and

causal); (b) noun phrases; (c) reference (endophora and exophora); and (d) verbs. In

this study, Pellegrini reports consistently high correlations (.62 to .93) between play

categories of symbolic play and literate language use among preschool dyads. Other

descriptive findings support the preliminary research on literate language in dramatic

and symbolic play contexts. Sachs, Goldman, and Chaille (1985) report that preschool

age children engaged in dyadic play with a set of pretend doctor toys produce higher

rates of specific vocabulary (medical terms and functions) as compared to non-thematic

play, such as construction or block-building.

Language Intervention Research

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Language intervention research with children having language and

developmental disabilities typically involves targeting functional language goals in

conversational play contexts (Nathan, 2002; Raab & Carl, 2004; Smith et al., 2004;

Warren & Yoder, 2004). Intervention studies involve children’s specific language feature

use during play contexts in home- and clinic-based settings. Findings indicate that

factors such as facilitation technique (i.e., direct or indirect), interaction partner (parent

or clinician), and setting (e.g., clinic, home, or preschool) are important considerations

to the efficacy of language interventions with young children (e.g., Smith et al., 2004).

Dramatic play and linguistic specificity. McKeough (1984) examines the effects of

sociodramatic play on linguistic specificity of children with disabilities in dramatic play.

McKeough reports significant correlations between dramatic play enactments and

children’s use of linguistically specific features with groups of children, ranging in age

from 4 to 10 years old. The findings indicate that the combination of dramatic play and

narrative retelling consistently results in higher rates of literate language use

(conjunction and mental-linguistic verbs) across both language ability and age groups of

children than either context by itself.

Drama and social communication. Other research aimed at social communication

involved data collection via observations, interviews, and collaboratively created and

performed artwork with middle and high school age students with autism spectrum

disorder (ASD) (Schieman & Nichols, 2010). The methodology was “a/r/tographic”, in

which the authors acted as artists, researchers, and teachers throughout the study

(Leavy, 2008). Participants in the week-long drama program included 29 adolescent

campers who with ASD and 18 adolescent camp counselors. The authors reported

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robust gains in participants’ social communication understanding and concept

development. A similar effect of drama was observed in gains of elementary age

students with learning disabilities engaged in a creative drama program, which led to

increased social and oral expressive language skills (de la Cruz, 1995).

Drama and literacy skills and attitudes. Krakaur (2005) conducted a mixed

method study of process drama to teach literacy skills to seventh grade students with

disabilities. Reading attitude surveys, interviews, and observation data were collected

to identify changes in reading comprehension, written language, and motivation among

students. Process drama was implemented as a central instructional device for a three

month literature unit in which the study occurred. Using Heathcote’s (as cited in

Wagner, 1999) “mantle of the expert” approach, students were placed in roles as

documentarians to create a film. As students moved in and out of the dramatic world,

they engaged in multiple forms of literacy (listening, speaking, reading, and writing).

Students increased in their self-reported attitudes toward literacy, as well as in their

performance on standardized reading and criterion-based written language

assessments.

Review of the Literature on Drama in Education

Catterall’s review of the research on drama in education reveals important

aspects about the state of what is known about its effects in education. The criterion for

studies to be included in the review was that individuals adopted roles (i.e., characters

other than themselves), with drama broadly defined by the unifying characteristic of the

adoption of character roles by learners. The studies involved portraying a character

from children’s literature; other roles emerged from fantasy and pretend play with adult

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prompting. Most research had groups of children enacting scenarios or completing

stories, with and without advance planning, concentrating on early childhood and

elementary age populations. Drama was found to influence literacy outcomes focused

on narrative understanding and comprehension (e.g., Dupont, 1992; Pellegrini & Galda,

1982; Page, 1983; Parks & Rose, 1997; Williamson & Silvern, 1992). Other studies

found effects of “thought organizing’ drama, narrative, and fantasy play activities on

written expression (Moore & Caldwell, 1993; Pellegrini, 1980; Wagner, 1986).

Barriers and Facilitators

Barriers

Barriers to using dramatic arts to teach literacy skills include the primary focus on

rudimentary tasks, rather than complex and deeply engaging ideas. This issue is

precipitated by the focus on teaching and reaching standardized benchmarks, which

prevents much of the engagement through IAA from occurring (Gulatt, 2008). As

several studies note, IAA’s role in school curriculum increases student achievement

(e.g., Deasy, 2002; Eisner, 1998; Reardon, 2005). Based on a study of a large-scale

project in Minneapolis, researchers concluded “the amount of arts integration matters.”

More than mere exposure to the arts is necessary to affect substantial gains in learning

(Cornett, 2007, p. 10).

Another barrier is in the lack of preservice teacher education and professional

development for IAA such as drama. Drama is generally viewed as a performance art

rather than a process to engage students and scaffold literacy development. Similarly,

training and support for inservice teachers and staff at schools is another barrier to

implementation of IAA. Since drama in education shifts traditional teacher and student

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dynamics, teachers must be able to reflect and process these shifts (McGregor et al.,

1977). For example, children, either on their own or with the teacher, are encouraged to

find, select, and create their own material, a radical shift from conventional teacher-

controlled materials selection.

Facilitators

A key facilitator to implementing IAA is in the development of teacher knowledge

and skill (Cornett, 2007, p. 223). This type of professional development effort should

span the art forms, their integration within content areas (e.g., literacy), and the types of

differentiation, accommodations, and modifications necessary to meet individuals’

unique learning needs, to include students with diverse learning needs. Teachers must

feel comfortable gradually developing arts literacy and pedagogy, allowing for their

personal and attitudinal investment in IAA with students having a wide range of needs

and abilities (Cornett, 2007). In conjunction with professional development aimed at

integrated arts literacy and pedagogy, another key facilitator is in the existence of a

unifying and collaborative effort, particularly with inclusion of students with disabilities in

IAA school wide.

An insight from the field of special education is in the role of universal design for

learning (UDL) as a facilitator to successful inclusion in IAA. Conceivably, UDL ensures

opportunities for students of diverse abilities to access, participate, progress in dramatic

arts activities focused on literacy learning. The principles of UDL can guide our thinking

about facilitators in the use of multiple means of: (1) representation to give learners

various ways of acquiring information and knowledge; (2) expression to provide learners

alternatives for demonstrating what they know; and (3) engagement to tap into learners'

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interests, offer appropriate challenges, and increase motivation (Center for Applied

Special Technologies, 2010).

Eisner (2000) maintains that “the limits of language do not determine the limits of

our thinking.” Students with diverse learning needs deserve unlimited approaches to

facilitate expression of their ideas. The mediation of specific literate language through

representational forms such as drama provides access and the opportunity for these

students to participate and progress in literacy skill learning. Drama is well-positioned to

play a pivotal role in teaching and learning as educators aim to foster students’

processing of thought and language in as full, complex, and sensitive ways as possible,

with the goal of conveying information through spoken and written word (i.e., literacy

skills). This statement reflects an individual’s entire experience and at the same time

orders it and relates it to other knowledge, which is a goal worthy of any educational

endeavor (Wagner, 1999).

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