Drama Games: How the Key Tenets of Improv Can Scaffold Critical Literacy

• In Event: Acting Up: Dramatic Approaches for Socially Engaged Language and Literacy Education Online and in Person

Abstract

Drama games go beyond acting skills to include theatre techniques that help language learners perform themselves with agency, dignity, and a sense of humor even in the most trying of circumstances. Grounded in critical pedagogies of performance, this session showcases theatre as a part of TESOL and World Language curriculum that can take place in both virtual and face to face classrooms. The leaders of this mini-session will introduce four key tenets of improvisational theatre that undergird skills necessary to support spontaneous and agentive target language use both within and outside the classroom. These tenets are:

1. Be Present & Pay Attention- the skill of listening and awareness, paying attention to the language, gestures, sounds, and other contextual cues that help one make sense of a given communicative event.
2. Say “Yes, And”- the skill of accepting and building off of what speakers and listeners do in real-time interactions.
3. R&R (take risks and be ridiculous)- developing comfort with taking risks with our bodies, our language, and ourselves to develop a tolerance to, even invite, vulnerability by feeling/looking/sounding silly
4. Endow Scenes with Meaning- the skill of bringing ideas to the table, in the moment, about the who, what, where, and why of any given “scene” or communicative event.

The authors introduce each tenet by engaging attendees in participating in drama/improv games with a focus on language acquisition for social change. As Boal (1992) wrote, “If everybody is ridiculous, no one is!” (p. 88). These theatre games require players to take risks with their body, mind, and language, to be supportive to one another, and committed to building on other peers’ contributions. Learners and teachers may not necessarily be trained actors, but training in observation, attention, and collaboration is essential to what Goffman (1959) referred to as the “Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.” We engage attendees in taking risks in verbal and non-verbal communication and in rehearsals in being ridiculous, and therefore developing the skills needed to engage in equity-oriented work in language education.

Experienced workshop leaders present drama-based pedagogical practices studied during an international Fulbright scholarship program in Mexico (Author1, 2016) as well as a yearlong ethnographic study of adult ESOL learners who learned language through drama in the northeastern U.S. (Author 2, 2016). Cultivating a classroom that is both surprising and engaging, these drama-based activities will keep the educator learning and laughing alongside students during the unexpected turns a jointly scripted classroom might take. Attendees will leave with experience and instruction for teaching dozens of L2 drama games, as well as with experience in improvisation and adaptation for virtual language learning contexts.

Authors

• Melisa Misha Cahnmann-Taylor, University of Georgia

• Kathleen Rose McGovern, University of Georgia - Athens