Integración de métodos cuantitativos y cualitativos en evaluación de programas evaluación de programas

Drama, also known as enactment or action strategies (see Wilhelm, 2003), helps students to evoke, experience, interpret, and reflect on all kinds of texts. Drama strategies are assistive in making sophisticated strategies of reading visible and available to students in powerful ways that help them to use, experiment with, and ultimately internalize these strategies.

In addition to drama, you can also use a range of other tools to help bolster students’

confidence and engagement in their reading. The Chicago Teachers Center is an amazing group of educators who work in various ways to improve the learning environments and achievement of students throughout the Chicago Public School system.

One of their missions, among many others, is to incorporate the arts as a learning tool across the curriculum. At several of the schools teachers are using various forms of enactment throughout readings as a strategy to support reading comprehension and engagement. They are also using enactment strategies after reading to create knowledge artifacts to reflect on and represent what had been learned through a unit of study.

Through using these strategies, the schools that were on probation for low-test scores in reading achievement had been rapidly improving in their scores (as well as in several other ways cited by teachers, like sense of community, interest, attendance).

Recently, several of the schools were engaged in a unit studying the rainforest. Several teachers from each school had gone on an expedition to the Amazon and had communicated with students back in Chicago through email and Internet postings. They brought back numerous artifacts and video footage for students to study. Later teachers and most of the students from the Audubon School near Wrigley Park dressed up as

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favorite literary characters in a special celebration during which all students would present to their classes in character as they provided a book report and made a case for reading their character’s books. The event culminated with a parade through the neighborhood.

In the end, the students were able to use what they had learned from the artifacts and videos of the Amazon as they enacted their roles in this dramatized version of life in the Amazon basin.

Situating Role-Plays

Start with a “close to home” role-playing activity. Select a character and have students brainstorm information that character would know and how they would feel. Try to connect the character’s life or problem to something in the student’s world. You could use the role-play planning steps on p. 174 to help you get started.

As the school day began, 6th grade teacher Lara DiPardo was using enactment to review important rainforest concepts that they would now use as they engaged in a social action project. She first asked the students to use vocabulary tableaux, pictures created visually with their bodies, to represent concepts like “deforestation,” “global warming,”

“ecosystems,” “symbiosis,” and other sophisticated ideas. Students from different groups then combined to perform short skits showing the relationship of these ideas. The teacher then asked students to do “character walks” showing the life experiences of indigenous people and various species of flora and fauna due to recent changes wrought in the rainforest environment. She then asked them to walk into the future to imagine what might happen next under various scenarios.

Freezing the Action/Creating a Tableaux Vivant

Have students create a “living statue” of a vocabulary word or idea, the meaning of a story, or thought of a character, of a scene or a predicted event. Bring a STILL OR VIDEO camera into class so you can document your students’ use of the Tableaux strategy. Start a bulletin board displaying the Tableaux they create. Have students do an explanation of why they chose to do their Tableaux in a particular way and post those along with the pictures.

The students used these ideas and experiences as fodder for brainstorming social action projects that could affect the various outcomes they foresaw. A design workshop had been set up and students created woodcut cards of various scenes and animals from the rainforest. These were beautifully printed in organic black ink on recycled cream paper.

The students planned to use these cards to write letters to the superintendent of schools and various political figures as they outlined environmental issues (implicating the schools and local community as they did so!) and proposed solutions to these problems.

One group, for example, had found in their research that Boise Cascade, the prime supplier of paper products to the district, harvested old growth forests. The students recommended that a public statement be made, and that business instead be turned over to companies that harvested only new growth forests. Other students argued for the gradual elimination of paper from the school system as students could use electronic technologies notably absent in the school. Returning to a neighborhood school concept to eliminate busing and many other ideas of environmental import were offered.

The energy was uncommonly high, and all the students that Jeffrey spoke with were entirely engaged with their work. Several asked him if he was going to stay for the 168 HOW DO WE ENGAGE STUDENTS WITH LITERATURE?

character parade they would be marching in during that afternoon. The sense of school community was astonishing.

Jeffrey traveled next to Otis School in an old building near the downtown area comprised entirely of Latino students, most of whom spoke English as a second language.

The 5th grade class had taken on the “mantle of the expert” to design a museum, turning an entire classroom and hallway into a rainforest museum exhibit that represented what they had learned. Students played various roles in this museum. Jeffrey was escorted by two museum guides who took him first into the upper canopy, which had been created with great artistic dexterity. Both real and artificial exhibits of plants, insects, and animals were accompanied by informational placards and essays. Some students role-played the parts of particular flora and fauna with whom visitors could converse. Jeffrey not only elicited specific information from them, but their feelings about the changes in their environment. He then proceeded to the middle and lower canopy, and finally into the Amazon River itself where he met pink dolphins (paper-mâché) and piranhas (taxidermical) and a variety of other aquatic life (role-played by students). As Jeffrey continued back to shore he felt himself getting wet. As he looked up, he noticed students behind a facade misting the people in the forest! Talk about virtual reality.

Assuming the Mantle of the Expert

Decide on a focus for trying the Mantle of the Expert technique. What is the next unit or text you are teaching? How can you use Mantle of the Expert to put your students in the position of exercising the authority and ideas of an expert, in ways that will help your students move from being more novice to more expert? What can they create, real or imagined, to

demonstrate their expertise and ways of solving the kinds of problems that confront the expert they are role-playing?

As Jeffrey left this exhibit, he entered one about “indigenous people” (these were the words used by his 5th grade guide!). The students playing these parts were preparing food with malioc and nuts and other native staples. They carefully explained to Jeffrey how the malioc must be prepared to avoid poisoning oneself. Being a trusting kind, he accepted their explanation and ate a malioc pancake. Jeffrey spoke with the students, in their role as indigenous people, at length about their life, religion, beliefs, and lifestyle.

From there he went to a storytelling center where he heard native stories, and then to the final exhibit which was staffed by students role-playing environmentalists. Jeffrey spoke to these students about ecosystems, symbiosis, chemical degradations, and deforestation and was astonished at their profound understandings. The tour guides informed him about some real world opportunities to sign petitions, to lend support to various environmental organizations to help purchase tracts of rainforest for a reserve, and gave him a check sheet of things he could do in his own home to protect the rainforests and the general environment. They said they hoped to add an exhibit about protecting the environment to their already impressive museum.

They hoped to do so before the exhibit was opened to the general public and other schools. You see, the museum had been such a success that community members and other teachers in the network wanted their students to experience it too. Enactment strategies had been used to create a real living knowledge document that did the real work of representing what students had learned and helping others to learn it too.

One of the teachers told Jeffrey, “This whole project has really helped the students to seize!”

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Jeffrey thought her comment odd and assumed she meant “engage” as in “seize the idea or seize the day.” Jeffrey agreed with her and readily offered that the students seemed very excited and deeply immersed in the subject. “Well, yes,” she agreed, “but that’s not what I meant.” “Oh,” Jeffrey replied, “you meant it helps them to SEE in a new way! I couldn’t agree more! They clearly have taken on the lens of other perspectives—

the indigenous people, even the insects—and most profoundly they see from the future.

It certainly has transformed their vision and their ability to see.”

The teacher was patient as she explained that this too was true, but she had been using S.E.E.S as an acronym. She meant that the enactment work used to construct the museum had helped the students to Support each others’ learning and construct understandings together, to Experience the rainforest almost as if they had been there, to Embody new ways of knowing and being in the world, and to Share what they had learned with others. The drama work had helped them create knowledge and had made their knowledge visible and accountable to each other, their teachers, and now the community.

Jeffrey was quite taken with the S.E.E.S. acronym and agreed once again whole -heartedly. Jeffrey’s research into drama and enactment, as well as engagement, reading and learning, has demonstrated that these are some of the central things dramatic enactments help students to do as readers and learners, though this is not the full extent of enactment’s potential by any means!

As gratified and as impressed as Jeffrey was with the students’ work in these two schools, these were not singular experiences. We see this kind of excitement, devotion to reading for the purpose of making and sharing things together, and the satisfaction that comes from a significant achievement over and over again in all of our work with schools. These benefits accrue when using enactment for two minutes to explore a character’s decision making process or the meaning of vocabulary, and they accrue when students engage in more extended kinds of enactments like mantle of the expert dramas (Heathcote & Bolton, 1995), living history museums (Wilhelm & Edmiston, 1998;

Wilhelm, 2003), or the rainforest exhibit described here.

Enactment/drama strategies comprise a powerful repertoire of tools for both teaching and learning because students actively create meaning together, listen to each other, explore implications, and enjoy themselves. The drama context itself provides what can be called “environmental assistance” that encourages and co-produces meaning-making.

Throughout the rest of this chapter, we’ll take a close look at a few particular kinds of strategies and the work they can do to assist readers.

Though the focus here will be on supporting and assisting students to grow in their interpretive facility while reading literature, and on learning from reading, enactment has many other powerful benefits that relate to reading. It can help students to learn difficult concepts from a variety of subject areas; it can provide a situation and context for learning; it can support and guide the pursuit of various kinds of inquiry. Enactment supports students to ethically explore and engage with issues, and as we saw here, to work together in a democratic community. Jeffrey’s own research studies with colleague Brian Edmiston have demonstrated how all of these things can happen through the use of enactment strategies (Wilhelm & Edmiston, 1998). This research also demonstrates how enactment strategies work to help teachers integrate content area instruction, infuse all of the arts into their teaching, co-research both the process of learning and conceptual content topics with students and each other, and to generally revitalize and energize their teaching through the use of drama.

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Reenactment dramas, discussion dramas, and correspondence dramas allow the students to perform the same roles, but in different forms. By choosing differing forms of dramatization, teachers can accommodate differing learning styles, create variety in the role-plays, and build writing into the students’ dramatic repertoire.