writing with your feet
DESCRIPTION
Keynote for Illinois Writing Project March 2, 2012TRANSCRIPT
The Beginning
• Made possible with a grant from Kraft Foods.
• This research study, which is exploratory in nature, was conducted at the request of The Second City Training Center.
• Why did a place that produces artists like Steven Colbert and Tina Fey connect with schools?
Second City and Arts Outreach
An Overview
Qualitative Design:Research Design
Over one hundred clock hours of observation in the classrooms of the study’s participants.
Participant-Observers in teacher professional development workshops.
Conducted open-ended, semi-structured interviews (Spradley, 1979) with several teachers from each of the schools in order to better understand the project from the teachers’ point of view.Student Artifacts.
Table 1: Racial/Ethnic Background and Other Information—Lakeside Elementary School
White
Black
Hispanic
Asian/Pacific Islander
Native American
Multi-Racial
Low Income
LEP
Truancy Rate
Mobility Rate
Attendance Rate
Enrollment
SCHOOL
19.8
41.2
22.7
15.5
0.8
0.0
74.2
14.4
1.0
5.4
95.6
1557
DISTRICT
8.8
49.2
38.4
3.3
0.2
0.0
85.4
14.0
3.9
24.0
92.0
Table 2: Racial/Ethnic Background and Other Information—South Primary School
White
Black
Hispanic
Asian/Pacific Islander
Native American
Multi-Racial
Low Income
LEP
Truancy Rate
Mobility Rate
Attendance Rate
Enrollment
SCHOOL
0.0
100.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
99.6
0.0
5.0
25.8
94.6
485
DISTRICT
8.8
49.2
38.4
3.3
0.2
0.0
85.4
14.0
3.9
24.0
92.0
Table 3: Racial/Ethnic Background and Other Information—Midtown Elementary School
White
Black
Hispanic
Asian/Pacific Islander
Native American
Multi-Racial
Low Income
LEP
Truancy Rate
Mobility Rate
Attendance Rate
Enrollment
SCHOOL
0.0
95.0
5.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
95.0
1.5
17.5
63.5
88.6
201
DISTRICT
8.8
49.2
38.4
3.3
0.2
0.0
85.4
14.0
3.9
24.0
92.0
It
MontessoriShe argued that play was the work of children and central to child development
The Essential Dimensions of Play Are:
Being voluntary, enjoyable, purposeful, and spontaneous.
Expanding creativity by using problem-solving skills, social skills, language skills, and physical skills.
Helping to expand on ideas.
Supporting the child in adapting socially.
Serving to thwart emotional problems.
Begins with Play
Spolin’s Connectionbetween
Montessori’s ideas are echoed in the work of Viola Spolin.
Spolin is the foundational theorist for a highly structured form of theater/drama called improvisation.
•Spolin’s beginnings in the Chicago settlement houses.
•It was her son, Paul Sills who founded The Second City.
Play and Learning
• Develops and demands focus that prompts our physical and mental state to merge.
• Creates a game having a specific problem to be solved. Players engage intuitive energy through improvisation and develop problem-solving skills.
• Prompts the merging of action and thought to solve a problem.
In Spolin’s
View Play:
Literacy and Improvisation Connections
Improvisation Exercises
Grouping is spontaneous and changes with almost every exercise.
Skill development is embedded within the literacy activity. Participants learn by doing (Spolin, 1986).
Focus is on the participant and contribution to the ensemble.
Teacher actively participates and is a member of the ensemble.
Teacher and students actively participate and interact in the improvisation exercise.
Reading Instruction In Balanced Literacy Program
Student grouping is dynamic and flexible. The composition of the groups regularly changes.
Skills development and practice is embedded within the literacy activity.
Focus is on the student, not the exercise.
Teacher actively participates and interacts with the students.
Teacher and students actively interact with the text.
Improvisation Exercises
Side coaching is designed to aid the participants in problem solving as the students participate in the improvisation activity.
The participants are focused on presenting dramatic representations that communicate clearly to the audience. In other words, the meaning that the participants create, most be understood by the audience.
Students create and respond in the exercise with personal, authentic, and meaningful representations and interpretations.
Students create independently as members of a creative ensemble.
Assessment is ongoing and continuous through peer and teacher feedback.
Reading Instruction In Balanced Literacy Program
Questions are created to develop higher order thinking skills and to actively problem solve.
The students are focusing in understanding meaning from the text.
Students respond to the story through personal and authentic exercises
Students read independently.
Assessment is ongoing and continuous through peer and teacher feedback.
SKILLS
Vocabulary Development
Sequencing
Prediction
Representation of non-linguistic text
Adding details to textual representations
Focus
Concentration
Interpretation
Synthesis of information
Developing an understanding and appreciation of literary genres
Idea and topic generation
Active exploration of student author’s voice
Appropriate use of oral language
Analysis of context in both linguistic and non-linguistic text
READING WRITING SPEAKING LISTENINGTab
le 4: Language A
rts Skill S
ets D
eve
loped Through T
he Second
City’s Im
provisation for Creative P
edagogy P
rogram
There were positive impacts in several areas, and although the work is exploratory in nature, it corroborates other studies that show the benefits of drama and theater arts in the classroom, and that it points to the potential for such work to make even greater contributions to literacy pedagogy and student learning.
Four
First, the playfulness inherent in the art of improvisation engaged the students wholly in the activities, increasing the involvement even of youngsters who had been reluctant to participate in other classroom work.
Major Themes
Secondly, this engagement strengthened classroom community, making possible the opportunity for students who had previously been marginalized and/or who had special learning needs to take on more positive roles in their classrooms.
Third, particular children’s increased engagement led to confidence with expression, which helped them to extend their authoring abilities in both spoken and written forms and to take on the identity of “author.”
The qualitative data make clear that these activities helped all the students - many of whom were reluctant readers and writers - to enter texts, to respond, and to create, and to evoke and exert control over the ideas, sensations, characters, and meanings that they were experiencing in their required schoolwork.
Finally, for most of the teachers, participating in training workshops and collaborating with visiting artists in their classroomshelped to expand their repertoire of pedagogical strategies and began to broaden their definition of literacy beyond what Shannon (1995) calls a psychological view and Street (1995) calls an autonomous model of literacy that emphasizes mere “correctness” of language use and that is based on the belief that reading and writing are best learned one sub-skill at a time.
Potential Impact on Students With Special Needs
Engaging mixed ability groups, which include students with special needs, creates a setting where students are able to transcend barriers.
In the schools where the research team observed, we were able to observe collaboration, participation and engagement of students with special needs as they participated in improvisation activities with their regular education peers.
Next Steps
Connecting research between the adolescent brain and improvisation.
Greater exploration of improvisation and students with special needs.
Additional study examining the connections between literacy and improvisation.
In Loving Memory
My co-author and sister
Mary Siewert Scruggs
(April 16, 1964-January 12, 2011)
Email: [email protected]
Website: www.KatherineMcKnight.com
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