“It got me going into a story”: Multiperspectival Learning through Drama Integration

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 7:45 am - Gold 3
  In Roundtable Session: Stories on the Move: Tracing the Flows of Student’s Embodied Literacies

Abstract

While studies have affirmed the benefits to bringing drama into classrooms (Beach et al., 2015; Hendrix et al., 2012; Walker et al., 2011), particularly as a way to support the most marginalized learners in classrooms (Siegel, 2006), according to a report by the National Center for Education Statistics, only 4% of public elementary schools offer drama or theater programs (Parsad & Spiegelman, 2012). Inspired by these statistics, this practitioner inquiry study (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2001) explored how a second-grade teacher and a drama teacher-researcher created an inquiry community centered on integrating drama into a culturally and linguistically diverse second-grade literacy classroom, and how students took up those invitations.
The authors of this paper utilized Community-Based Research in Education methodologies (Ghiso & Campano, 2024) to develop this year-long study from their 7-year partnership. Over one school year, we asked, what happens when second-grade literacy students are invited to use drama and embodied storytelling to engage in critical issues of race, language, and development?
To answer this question, artifacts connected to one student–Alondra– were analyzed to examine how she took up invitations to engage in embodied storytelling. Data artifacts include written reflections, semi-structured interviews, video data, and audio recordings of her participation throughout the study.
By analyzing these artifacts with a transliteracies lens, texts Alondra interpreted and texts she composed were traced across temporal and material spaces including but not limited to her embodied movements. We found that Alondra utilized drama integration and embodied storytelling to shift roles and embody new perspectives. Video data over the course of the study showed Alondra embodying different characters from Little Red Riding Hood during different activities. In her exit letter explaining what she learned through drama over the course of the year, she wrote, “[drama] got me going into a story.” During our follow-up semi-structured interview, when asked about that statement, Alondra said, “[my teacher] or you were reading a story. I imagined that I was in it. Because when we were imagining the little red when [my teacher] was reading the Little Red Riding Hood, I kept thinking I was the little red. Or the big bad wolf.” Alondra says drama is a way to not only embody a character, but also to imagine you are a character– and that character can differ based on time, circumstance, and invitation. In this presentation, I will share and analyze video data of Alondra embodying both Little Red and the Big Bad Wolf at different times in the story, due to different circumstances including teacher invitations and student collaborative decisions.
A transliteracies framework helps to illuminate how second graders can move between contrasting characters and perspectives using embodied storytelling, a critical skill for developing empathetic and multiperspectival students. Additionally, in the field of literacy studies, culturally responsive pedagogy typically involves teachers incorporating texts that are relevant to their students cultural and linguistic identities– the findings of this study propose the importance of drama integration and embodied storytelling as a type of culturally responsive pedagogy.

Authors

• Jacqueline Winsch, University of Pennsylvania

• Lauren Borrasso, St. Laurentius School