LITERACY BELIEF STATEMENT
5 May 2017
This semester, I have spent a third of my Theatre Education Program Block I time in a classroom full of English Ed majors. It has been a wonderful experience to get to know them and to share information on reading material and lesson plans, and to work together on building our teacher toolboxes. Over the course of the past few months, we learned numerous literacy strategies from our textbooks and from mini lesson plans taught by our peers, we engaged each other in conversation about what literacy means, and we expanded our horizons on teaching styles as we developed our own. I often felt strange as a Theatre Ed major, knowing that my classroom management and course materials would be so different from my peers, but I was able to find many ways to contribute my background in theatre to help my classmates build their engagement skills and to give them tips on handling play scripts in their own future classrooms. Since beginning this course, I have learned about teacher strategies that had been used in classrooms by my own favorite teachers during my public education, and I have been able to utilize some of those techniques in activities with Batchelor Middle School students when we visit them during their last class period. My concept of literacy has expanded and I see so much more potential for growth in my future students’ understanding of the world if I can integrate some of these activities into my lesson plans for my future theatre students of all levels – from intro through advanced and into production courses and after school rehearsal time.
I believe that literacy is the key to communication in the classroom, and that it should be a priority for all teachers, regardless of subject matter, to teach literacy along with their course material. We know that teachers with extensive backgrounds in their content areas are more effective in the classroom, as outlined in the first chapter of Content Area Literacy: “Student achievement increases by 40 percent of a grade level in both mathematics and science when teachers have a major or minor in the subject. […] Students who engage in active, hands-on learning activities and respond to higher-order thinking questions outperform their peers by more than 70 percent of a grade level in mathematics and 40 percent in science” (Vacca).
With this in mind, it is imperative that we engage our students in their own educations, as we engage ourselves in the pursuit of further education for our own growth and development as teachers. Times change, discoveries are made, and the next generation of students will be different than this one. If we do not continue to build our own vocabularies, absorb more material in our field of study, and take the time to continue researching pedagogy and new advancements in the field of education beyond just our years of studying in the School of Education, how can we expect our students to strive to develop themselves as well? To build our own connections and to remain fresh in our teaching, we should attend teaching conferences, we should read new books to find new material, and we must continue to read, write, and reflect on our findings.
In my field of theatre education, we bring stories to life from the page to the stage, but without a strong grasp of literacy, my students will be left behind at the page and won’t be able to translate those ideas to the stage. “Effective teaching requires the use of differentiated learning strategies and a willingness to move beyond assigning and telling when using texts in the classroom” (Vacca). In order to maintain a productive theatre classroom, I will be assigning readings from the plays we are working on, and doing response work in the classroom to check their comprehension. There will be discussions, there will be questions, and we can tackle all of those through active engagement with the text. My cooperating teacher, Francesca Sobrer, always says “We cannot simply talk about theatre in the classroom, we must do theatre,” a sentiment which I wholeheartedly agree with. When students study Shakespeare in an English classroom, for example, it is common practice to engage the students by having them read a few lines of the text each as they go around the room, so that everyone pays attention. However, Romeo and Juliet was not written as poetry to be read and analyzed through text alone – it was written with and through poetry to be performed on a stage, and to be a story told to an audience. It was written with a rhythm like a heartbeat, in rhyming script to help the actors remember the lines. The students must not be confined to their desks when they study Shakespeare; the words must be felt, must be heard, as well as analyzed. At the very least, there should be a rhythm made by the students, which can be felt throughout the class, so that they can engage further with the performative aspect of the text even from their seats. The words can be complicated, but the lines are written in such a way that (similar to Dr. Seuss) a listener can easily apply context clues to understand what they’re saying, even with such unfamiliar vocabulary. When used in a lesson plan, Shakespeare can build self-efficacy for students who realize they can read aloud, give readers an opportunity to explore their own comprehension abilities, and can present his works as a fantastic strategy to build empathy in the classroom.
Literacy is key to communicating ideas across space and time, over continents and centuries, and we can build it through techniques like Read-Alouds and Reader’s Theatre, where mistakes are embraced and creativity is essential to the students’ success. Many students of mine will come to my classroom with little to no experience with theatre. But this is easily remedied with the simple truth: “What’s the main purpose of musical theatre? To tell the story,” says Marty Johnson, the director of education for iTheatrics, in a workshop where he coached a group of 40 middle school teachers on the methods of creating a school musical with their students. There is a story to be read and there are lives to be lead on the stage – there are hours of work and fun involved in the process, but if we do not tell the story to the audience, we have not succeeded as thespians.
My future classroom will be very theatrical, with a designated stage space and an audience area, so that they have room to move and experiment and connect with each other. My students will come from all sorts of potential – backgrounds I may have never conceived of, life stories that surprise me, and previous educational experiences I may never know much about. But they will be able to come to my classroom to learn about each other, to learn about life and, as Viola Davis said so beautifully in her recent Oscar Acceptance speech, “I became an artist and thank God I did, because we are the only profession that celebrates what it means to live a life.” My students will build their literacy through practicing their scene projects together: by reading excerpts aloud in class during our discussions, by building fluency in the repeated rehearsals of their projects, by building vocabulary in the word walls we create, and supporting their comprehension through the development and design of their own theatricality. They will learn to connect their own lives to the stories on the page, they will learn how other lives are led alongside theirs, and they will learn how to bring those connections to life under the stage lights, communicating the story to the audience. If I invest in my students’ literacy, I invest in their development as people: connections are the foundation of our society, but the key to connection is the text that surrounds us, to tell us stories, to help us grow, and to celebrate life.