Author: Wagner, Betty Jane.

Title: Understanding Drama-Based Education.

Source: Gerd Bräuer (Ed.): Body and Language. Intercultural Learning Through Drama. Westport, Connecticut & London 2002. P. 4-18.

Publisher: Ablex Publishing.

Published with kind permission of the editor.

Betty Jane Wagner

Understanding Drama-Based Education

Those of us who have chosen a career working with language have inevitably chosen to work with the bodies as well as the minds of our students. What is language but sound produced on the breath by the complex action of the tongue, palate, larynx, and glottal mechanism to create aural symbols that have meaning in a particular language community? Indeed, communities are defined in large part by the language they share, a language that inevitably embodies a culture, an ethos, and a worldview. Furthermore, within each broad language group, there are subgroups defined by dialects and discourse communities that set them off from one another. How a group uses language, what topics they choose to talk about, and at what level of formality or social distance at which they communicate all help determine the character of a subgroup within any broader language community.

A second characteristic of language teaching is that it inevitably immerses us in a profoundly social milieu. At least until computers can recognize and represent aural human speech a lot better than they can now and can be programmed to respond spontaneously to speech (which I, for one, don’t believe will ever happen), one cannot learn to creatively engage in a conversation in a language unless one has real human beings to interact with. Audiotapes and computer language programs can help one learn certain common exchanges or routine phrases, but to learn how to improvise new utterances one has not yet heard, at least one other speaker of the target language is needed.

This is why informal improvisational drama activities are so powerful in the foreign-language classroom. To participate in an improvisation, one needs to use the body not only to produce appropriate language but also to express emotion and ideas through gesture, posture, and facial expression. Because the scene in a drama is an imaginary one, the participant is free to exaggerate or assume a persona that frees him or her to experiment with a wider range of language than ordinary exchanges might evoke.

Improvisational drama is effective because of the repeated pressure it puts on participants to respond. It is not enough for students to hear the target language spoken; they need to talk themselves. Studies have shown that television viewing as a medium for teaching language is of limited effectiveness. Children need not only to hear a language spoken but also to be expected to respond by producing their own language. A number of recent studies and reports-such as those of Blanch (1974), Bryam and Fleming (1998), Erdman (1991), Gaudart (1990), Geffen (1998), Kishimoto (1992), Masson (1994), Miller (1986), Ralph (1997), Welkner (1999), and Wilburn (1992)demonstrate the effectiveness of drama in facilitating the learning of a foreign language.

Comparison with writing and reading development

In the pedagogy of writing, two terms are often evoked: audience and purpose. Students who have neither are unlikely to develop voice in their writing. They need to know first who will read what they write and why they need to read it. Students simply write better for known audiences when they are telling about something they think their reader needs to know. Writing in the classroom may look like it is personal and private, but as students read their drafts to one another, the act of writing becomes social. The tension to produce a text that is true to what the writer wants to say and yet also one that communicates to one’s peers is central to the decisions that every writer must make. For example, in a second-grade class made up largely of students who were born in Mexico, I asked the students to write about what their families do to remedy a cough. One of the children wrote that his mother gave him a spoonful of tequila at bedtime. One of his classmates asked, „What is tequila?“ The fact of a social milieu, one that included students of different cultures, created a need for greater precision in writing; in other words, audience and purpose determined content. The same is true in a classroom drama. A language learner with an audience and a purpose is pressed to discover the words he needs to respond appropriately in the context of the drama.

There is a parallel in the process of learning to read. It is often noted that children become literate in literate environments, but literate environments are not enough, or turning kids loose in libraries would be all we need to do. No, what has to happen is a gradual induction into a literate discourse community, a group of persons who talk and interact in terms of a literate culture. It is not enough to learn to read and write; a literate person also needs to learn how to talk like one who senses the value of the written word-his own as well as that of others. Highly valued instructional strategies, such as reading circles, author’s chairs, collaborative writing, cooperative learning groups, all share an emphasis on talk and on the community it generates. An effective foreign-language classroom needs to do the same. Becoming literate is not just about the skills of literacy-it is fundamentally about expanding one’s community, about entering a conversation that goes beyond the confines of the child’s home and intimate family and neighborhood group. Because our classrooms are increasingly multicultural, this means crossing ethnic and cultural boundaries to converse with those who differ.

Becoming fluent in another language is not just about the mastery of the vocabulary and grammar of that language. It is a way to expand one’s community. Just as a reader lives in a wider world than a nonreader, so a speaker of more than one language lives more broadly. Both reading and learning another language can also function as ways to gain a perspective on one’s own experience, language, and culture. As Marshall McLuhan said, „I don’t know who discovered water, but I know it wasn’t a fish.“ When we are immersed in only one language, we are not likely to be aware of its peculiarities or limitations. As most learners of a second language will tell you, we discover our first language as we dive into a second one.

When a person learns another language, something is „undergone.“ We „undergo“ when we allow our encounters to modify our established conceptions. When we undergo an experience, we ultimately have to change ourselves and our way of looking at the world. This is what true learning is-a modification of our very selves.

No instructional strategy is any more powerful than drama-based education for creating situations in which students undergo an experience that has the potential of modifying them as persons. Educational drama, which we define here as informal classroom improvisation, affects the ways students think and learn. In the rest of this chapter, I highlight research that shows drama’s powerful effect on thinking, reading, writing, and foreign-language learning, and 1 review two major theories that underlie drama as a way to learn-those of Lev Vygotsky and Jerome Bruner. Finally, I end with an illustration.

When students engage in improvisational drama, they are behaving symbolically. They are saying, for example, that for the purposes of imaginative play, a certain chair is a pilot’s cockpit. This ability to say that this stands for that is critical to thought. Unless children can respond to and create symbols, they cannot learn to read, write, or engage in mathematical thinking. Why do any of us want to converse, read, write, or reason? We engage in these processes in order to perceive, to expand our perspective on, and to more deeply understand and enter into our world. As we do this, we use symbols. Young children spontaneously engage in imaginative play for the same three reasons-to understand, to gain a larger perspective on, and to interact more profoundly with their world.

In drama (just as in thinking, reading, and writing) students make meaning by connecting their prior experience to the challenge of the moment-to come up with an apt image and response as a player in an improvisation. This is not different from the challenge of the reader or writer of a text to come up with an apt image or response.

In drama-based education, students generate an improvisation-assuming a role in a particular moment in time and creating with others a plausible world. I am not considering in this chapter performing texts-acting out plays-although that can also be a very effective way to master another language.¹

The effect of drama on cognition, oral language, reading, and writing

A great many studies show that drama develops thinking, oral language, reading, and writing. Six of these respected studies show that drama improves students’ cognitive growth, as reflected in language skills, problem-solving ability, and I.Q. Moreover, the changes are lasting.²

Several studies show that drama also improves role taking,³ which is comprehending and correctly inferring attributes of another person. These inferences, which include another’s thinking, attitudes, and emotions, are a function of cognitive perception. In Piaget’s terms, to engage in role taking is to „decenter“ or move away from a predominantly egocentric stage of development. Growth in cognition is dependent on growth in role taking.

Not surprisingly, drama improves oral language as well as thinking. I looked at thirty-two quasi-experimental or correlational studies of the effects of drama on oral language development, and found that twenty-five of these show that drama improves or correlates with improvement of oral language.⁴

And what is the effect of drama on reading? Five literature reviews conclude that drama seems to be effective in promoting literacy.⁵ Eighteen out of twenty-nine quasi-experimental studies I found in the literature show that drama improves story recall, comprehension, and/or vocabulary⁶. To illustrate, let’s look at the stunning results of the Whirlwind Program in Chicago.

Whirlwind has developed a Reading Comprehension Through Drama program that is currently conducting a series of twenty drama lessons in many Chicago public schools. Their widely respected statistical study (Parks & Rose, 1997) of fourth-graders showed that the students who participated in the Whirlwind program improved three months more than the control-group students in their Iowa Test of Basic Skills reading scores. This test is administered each spring to all Chicago public school students. The Whirlwind students improved 12.1 months from 1996 to 1997 on the Iowa test, and those without Whirlwind 9.1 months in the same period.

In the Reading Comprehension program, a group of Whirlwind actors read short stories to the children in grades K-8, and then they work together with them to act out the stories, draw pictures of them, and create three-dimensional miniversions of them. In the process, they form more detailed images in their heads as they read; these images are what help them remember and understand the facts of the story. The program’s results have recently come to the attention of Cozette Buckney, the Chief Education Officer of the Chicago public schools. If Whirlwind had chosen to measure only the effect of the program on the drama skills of children-which did improve significantly, by the way-the impact might not have been noticed. But when reading skills improved, it was front-page news in the Chicago Tribune (Beeler, 1999). This is why it is politically important for those of us who advocate drama to share results like these with policymakers.

Drama has a positive effect on writing as well. Emergent literacy studies show that children give their early writing a multimodality associated with gesture and graphics.⁷ Drama serves as an effective prewriting strategy, clarifying for children concepts they might want to explore through writing.

Recent observational studies report remarkable maturity in student writing that emerges from drama.⁸ Significant shifts in audience awareness occur before, during, and after drama. The writing produced in role shows more attention to sensory imagery, awareness of the reader, insight into characters’ feelings and empathy, and the need to clarify information and to disclose it selectively.

Seven statistical studies, including one I conducted, show that drama improves the quality of writing.⁹ It also significantly correlates with early word-writing fluency. Preschoolers who engage in symbolic play and drawing are more likely to read and write early.

Some of the best writing my own students have produced over the years has come when they are writing in role. At this stage in my career, I cannot imagine teaching any content at any level, including the graduate level (as my doctoral students will tell you) without drama. It is a powerful stimulus for thinking and writing.

Theoretical underpinnings

For the past twenty-five years I have advocated that educational drama is a basic and central experience, not an expendable frill in the classroom. When the late Jim Moffett and I were coauthoring the text Student-Centered Language Arts and Reading, K-12 (1992), we expanded the notion of basic language arts beyond the commonly accepted reading, writing, speaking, and listening. We added „dramatic inventing“ as one of the five basic skills because we firmly believe that drama is the matrix out of which all the other so-called basic skills emerge, namely, speaking, listening, reading, and writing. In other words, drama is the most basic of the basic skills.

What is the theory that explains the efficacy of improvisational or educational drama as a foundation for thinking, reading, and writing? The theory is this: Both educational drama and literacy are rooted in the same assumptions about learning. Two of the most generative learning theories to explain the role of improvisational drama are those of Lev Vygotsky (1966; 1978) and Jerome Bruner (1983; 1986; 1990). Both were instrumental in ushering in the constructivist theory of learning, and both provide a solid foundation for using drama in the classroom as a way to deepen and enlarge understanding of any subject matter.

Several other major theorists have asserted that imaginative role-playing is central to the development of thinking: Douglas Barnes (1968), James Britton (1970), and, of course, my coauthor, Moffett (Moffett & Wagner, 1992). Nor should we overlook the guiding educational philosopher of the early decades of this century, John Dewey (1959), nor Jean Piaget (1962), who, like Vygotsky (1966), showed how pretend play, especially the use of objects in a nonliteral fashion, parallels cognitive development. Piaget (1962) asserted that conceptual thinking develops through activity, spontaneous play, manipulation of objects, and social collaboration. He showed how participation in drama leads to improved listening, comprehension, sequential understanding, and the integration of thought, action, and language.

Constructivist Theory of Learning

Our understanding of the learning process has undergone a sea change in the last three decades, and thanks to the brain research quantum scientists are currently conducting, we may be on the verge of another such profound change. Simplistic behaviorist models of learning are now largely discredited, except to account for mastering the simplest of mechanical skills. Back in the 1950s when I was immersed in behaviorism at Yale University, Jerome Bruner and other cognitive psychologists in New York were discovering the brilliant Russian psychologist, Lev Vygotsky. They were not just tinkering with or reforming behaviorism; they were replacing it by putting the significance of meaning and values back into the center of human psychology. They began a quest to discover and describe formally how human beings create meaning. In so doing, they climbed into bed with thinkers who had been banished from psychology’s house for most of this century: philosophers, historians, anthropologists, linguists, novelists, poets, and dramatists.

The result has been the positing of the now widely held constructivist theory of learning based on the recognition that knowledge is constructed by each learner. As children actively engage in experiencing the world, they are just as actively constructing models in their minds to account for what they are undergoing. The way they think is literally transformed by their experience and by their attempts to make sense of it, and especially by those experiences that call for responses that are just beyond what they can generate on their own. Except for those psychologists who in the last quarter century have shifted from the construction of meaning to the processing of information, likening the brain to a computer, major learning theorists keep the making of meaning at the center of their understanding of how the human mind works (Bruner, 1990, p. 4).

Constructivist theory posits that human beings actively create their own models or hypotheses as to how the world works not just with the mental stuff of their biological brain but in dialogue with the culture in which they live. As Bruner (1986) suggests, humans construct meaning in the presence of three worlds: (1) the world they are born with, their innate human propensity to make sense of the world and their capacity to acquire language; (2) the objective reality of the real world; and (3) the culture in which they are immersed.

According to Bruner, all theory in science and all narrative and interpretive knowing in the humanities are dependent on the human capacity to create-to imagine a world. This is the amazing capacity that markedly sets us off from other members of the animal kingdom. As Susanne Langer (1957, p. 57) puts it, „Imagination is the primary talent of the human mind, the activity in whose service language has evolved.“

Children are active meaning-makers both in their play and in their work. They imagine how things work, and they test out those imaginings. In other words, learners are active, goal-oriented, hypothesis-generating symbol manipulators.

Learners express the understandings they have constructed in symbols-in gestures first, then in spoken words, drawings, and, finally, in written language. As they are pressured to find answers on their own, they are actively learning. A recent comparative study of the differences between Japanese and U.S. math lessons showed that teachers in Japan first ask students to solve a problem on their own before they teach a lesson. U.S. teachers tend to teach the lesson first and then ask the students to apply what they have learned. The Japanese students learn faster and more thoroughly. Drama is more like the Japanese math lesson. Each drama creates a problem for students before they have been taught how to respond. They act first and then reflect on their actions. Perhaps this accounts for drama’s power in effecting learning.

Another characteristic of drama is its emotional component. Because of the immediacy of the dramatic present and the pressure to respond aptly in role in a social setting, participants become vividly alive to the moment and alert to what is expected of them. As they get caught up in the emotion of the dramatic activity, they are often able to express themselves in a more mature manner and language than they could otherwise.

Zone of Proximal Development

Both dramatic improvisation and a dialogue with a teacher or more knowledgeable peer can provide the lure to learn in what Vygotsky (1978, p. 86) calls a learner’s zone of proximal development-the level just beyond the one at which one can function on one’s own. Watch children in their spontaneous play. They typically take on adult roles. Perhaps because they are little and powerless, they want to be the captain of the rocket ship, the most powerful Ninja, the bossy mother who knows what everyone needs and should be doing.

As children engage in spontaneous symbolic play or classroom drama directed by a teacher, they assume not only the language but also the personae of important adults. In the process, they are catapulted into a developmental level that is above their actual one. As they improvise, they are pressured to behave and use language in new and previously untried ways.

For example, Lee Galda and Anthony Pellegrini (1990) report on a threeyear-old-girl and a four-year-old girl who are playing doctor together. As they take off the doll’s imaginary diaper, one reprimands the other for using the word „poo poo“ when in role as the doctor (p. 94). The act of taking on a new persona demands a word choice beyond the language of her everyday life. The experiences the child has had in the society of adults is brought to bear on the task at hand, and the pull is toward internalizing a diction that had not ever before been part of the child’s own repertoire. This experience is not different in kind from that of the foreign-language learners who must try on a new way of expressing ideas.

How is an improvisational drama different from a story the child hears or reads? Drama is done not just with words but also with the body and gesture. It can be engaged in long before the child is ready to read and write. Therefore, Vygotsky sees it as the powerful prelude to and appropriate extension of literacy. Although young children often role-play alone, accompanying their actions with a flood of egocentric speech, when they start dramatic play with other children, they have to mesh their speech with that of others. It will no longer do to say only what they want to say. They must respond appropriately to the action and speech of others. Dramatic play is a profoundly challenging social event. Players must negotiate a single vision of what the drama is about, what the setting looks like, who takes which roles, and so on.

Often in improvisational drama, we find children scaffolding, that is, providing a framework on which other children can stand as they are pressured into their zone of proximal development. Holly Giffin (1984) presented an example of this in an observation of a child in role as queen

who is playing with a boy who is not quite yet able to imagine himself in his role. She orders him to bring her a vial of poison, and he comes back with a paper cup with real water. He grins sheepishly and smiles, „It’s only water.“ Without for a moment stepping out of role, the queen takes it, sniffs it, and decides, „You’re right! Go get me the other vial.“ The next time her page comes in and bows, he is firmly in role. „Here is the poison, your Majesty.“ Drama can challenge children to use both gesture and language they have never needed before. Gesture is a communication system even more basic to humans than language.

The Role of Gesture

Our first experiences both before and after birth were centered in our bodies. As newborns, we knew when we were hungry, dry, comfortable, held in strong and loving arms. As infants, every part of our body was engaged in making sense of our world-in constructing meaning.

Before we could talk, we used gestures to communicate. Vygotsky sees these as the earliest symbolic behavior. We reached toward and pointed at what we wanted. We waved “bye, bye“ before we had a word to go with the gesture. Thus movement and gesture, even before vocalization, are the beginning of communication. Gesture starts as random movement and ends as precise symbol. Random vocalization grows into speech; gesture develops into drawing and, later, writing. Writing begins with a baby’s gestures in the air; these are signs and symbols just as our later pictures and writings on paper are also.

Watch a child turn a block into an airplane or rocket. The gesture becomes the thing, and the child who is making this happen knows perfectly well this is a game of pretend. Because of the way he is moving the object, it has become for the moment a symbol for something else. If you ask him if this is a real rocket, he’ll look at you like you are stupid. Of course, it is not. But, please, let’s keep the game going; don’t stop the pretending to ask dumb questions like that.

Gesture-because it is done with the hand-also leads to drawing. The first drawings children do are not representational; rather, they are metaphorical symbols. This circle stands for a face. Most young children go through the familiar stage of drawing tadpole people. These simple drawings are not representations of the real people they see. Instead they are simply shorthand symbols. Arms and legs are just sticks attached to the circle. As Howard Gardner puts it, their early pictures „stand for the entire class or represent an ideal type, instead of depicting particulars that can be identified and then paired up with their realization in the `real world’ „ (Gardner, 1980, p. 65). Vygotsky sees both drawing and drama as developing from gesture. From the symbolizing in drawing and drama, it is just a short step to writing.

Enactive, Iconic, and Symbolic Representations of the World

Now let’s consider the theory of the second major constructivist, Jerome Bruner. He sees gesture as enactive representation-one of the three major ways human beings think-ways they represent and deal with reality: enactive, iconic, and symbolic or representational.

Enactive representation. Enactive is with the hand, iconic with the eye, and symbolic with the brain. In enactive knowing we learn „by doing,“ by experiencing with our body. Iconic knowing is knowing through an imageeither in the mind, in drawing, or in gesture. Symbolic knowing encompasses translation into language, the symbol system par excellence. However, all three kinds of knowing are actually symbolic.

We can easily see that drama involves all three kinds of representation. Role players use their bodies, create images in their minds and with their gestures, and use language to symbolize experience. Often in educational drama, participants stop to create drawings to help them visualize their common experience. Thus, participants in drama engage in enactive, iconic, and symbolic representation.

In Chicago, in addition to the reading comprehension program described earlier, the Whirlwind artists showed first-graders how to make letters with their bodies-enactively learning to connect shapes with sounds, an essential for early reading development. A statistical study (Rose, 1999) showed that after twenty sessions, the children who physically represented sounds by making shapes with their bodies improved significantly more than control students in their ability to recognize both consonant and vowel sounds and to separate spoken words into their phonemes. Enactive learning is very effective with young children.

Iconic representation. Now let’s look at iconic representation-knowing through images. Like role-playing, drawing stems from gesture. It is gesture crystallized. But not only drawing or drama creates images. Without imaging in our minds we cannot read or write either. So like enactive representation, iconic knowing is not unique to drama.

The growth of representational or symbolic thought is largely dependent on the ability to create mental images. Image begins as fleeting sensate happening, neural firings, and sensorimotor rehearsal. With the onset of the stage of development Piaget has termed object permanence, the child can hold the image and recall it when absent. This gives way to symbolic thought and dramatic play. Giving children a good environment that encourages them to imitate and symbolically play will enhance imagery skills and cognitive development.¹⁰

Studies show that the ability to fantasize freely is a cognitive skill related to concentration, fluency, and the ability to organize and integrate diverse stimuli. Drama influences imagery toward increased discrimination and vividness, and enhances the students’ ability to control their images.

Writing, like reading, is dependent on iconic representation. The challenge, especially for the fiction writer and poet, is in large part to create pictures with words.

Symbolic representation. As noted earlier, both dramatic play and drawing are ways children enter imaginatively into their worlds. In both, they are engaging in symbolism. Because dramatic play and drawing are ways of saying this stands for that, Vygotsky sees both as a precursor to writing. Like gestures, all three-dramatic play, drawing, and writing-are symbolic acts. It is just a step from drawing and drama to using letters symbolically, because writing is simply another way of symbolizing, and like drama and drawing, it has its roots in gesture. It is done with the hand, not the voice. It is putting onto a page something that stands for something else. A letter of the alphabet is simply a symbol for a speech sound.

Like drawing and writing, in improvisational drama one thing stands for another. The only difference is that the setting for drama must be a social one. Even here, however, there is an overlap with reading and writing. Literacy events for young children tend to be highly social occasions as well, as A.H. Dyson (1990) has so richly documented.

The first scream

To illustrate the power of drama and the other arts in helping students learn enactively and iconically, I close with an illustration of a classroom improvisational drama. The focus on the concrete symbol led to an understanding by the children of a much larger and more abstract issue-the need for safety regulations in factories.

This is an account of an eight-year-old’s response to a well-developed weeklong unit of study incorporating drama as well as other arts in Bradford, England. Christopher Ford conducted this history lesson for a group of sevento nine-year-olds. He used a true story about an event in the history of the school as the theme for the first week of the school year. The event was a tragic one set in 1869, when the boiler exploded in a bobbin mill that had stood next door to the school the students now attended. The safety valve of this steam boiler had been blowing off frequently in the weeks leading up to the tragedy. Local shopkeepers had complained. The manager of the mill told the boilerkeeper to do something to stop the complaints. He did. He put weights on top of the safety valve and tied them down with heavy rope.

At 10:25 on a Wednesday morning, just as the primary children went out into the playground next to the mill for recess, the boiler exploded. It demolished the mill, killing many workers inside, including the manager’s son. The wall collapsed onto the playground killing eight children and injuring many more. The bodies of two five-year-old boys were found with the hobbyhorse on which they were playing. The heavy safety valve from the boiler was found over a quarter of a mile away in a railway goods yard. The country was outraged. New laws about factory safety were passed as a result.

The class of children explored this story through drama, reading, and writing for the entire week. Mr. Ford led them through enactive, iconic, and symbolic representations of the event. The children looked at Victorian photographs and found out about Victorian schools. They read the local newspapers of the day and paid special attention to the London Times of 1869 to see what the children or their parents might have talked about at the breakfast table on the day of the tragedy. They looked for news items that children of that day might have noticed.

Then they used the enactive symbolization of dance to explore a theme of force and power against the fragility of people. They explored though drama the actions of town persons who heard about the tragedy and the reactions of relatives and friends of those who were killed or injured. They took on the roles of those who were near rather than actually in the explosion.

One source of information puzzled them. It was the original school logbook, which the school still keeps. There they read the headmaster’s comments of that day. It merely said, „Was obliged to send the children home today owing to the boiler explosion, eight of the children having been killed and many injured.“ Nothing more. The next entry was for three weeks later and read, „Commenced school today with a very fair attendance.“

After a few days of absorbing information about this event, the children focused on the first scream. Here the work became iconic, to use Bruner’s term. The children used art materials to create an image of the first scream. Lydia’s clay piece was a stark profile of a face with a wide-open mouth.

Then they dramatized that first scream, moving to enactive representation. Then they froze the action to capture a moment in time. They shared with each other their split-second pictures created with their bodies. The teacher asked them to think about a piece of writing that could capture a split second of the whole event, but that would somehow tell people everything they needed to know about what happened. Lydia’s poem shows the way her iconic and enactive learning fed into her use of words:

The first scream

One day.

An ordinary school day.

Wednesday 9th July 1869, an eight year old screamed in the

National School on Park Road.

Children in the school were as still

and silent as mice and stared across the room

to where Emily Grey was standing.

Now, Emily Grey was a nice girl.

She had blond curly hair, blue

eyes, rosy red cheeks and pinky-red smooth lips

But now she had wide, peeled eyes, pale face and a dry sore

throat.

Emily Grey was petrified.

She had her eyes fixed outside. All kinds of thoughts were

jumbled in her mind.

Astonished, puzzled, confused, hurt.

In the playground below, bricks piled high.

Heavy, jagged, sharp, rough. And underneath a face.

Soft, gentle, delicate, smooth

Blond hair, blue eyes, rosy cheeks. Her sister.

By Lydia, aged 8

This young child was able to capture the ordinariness of the scene and the sense that this little girl did not deserve this fate - she was “nice.“ The poem builds from the sound of the scream that riveted the attention of the class to Emily Grey’s face, then to what she saw outside, and finally to the denouement of the last two words. The juxtaposition of adjectives painted the picture graphically: “heavy, jagged, sharp, rough“ versus “soft, gentle, delicate, smooth.“ Economy of language, sensory imagery, dramatic juxtaposition, and the shock of the last line-all lead to the powerful impact of this profound response to a real but at first distant historical event.

Soon after this week, the school held one of many open houses for children to share their work with their parents. The teacher explained to Lydia’s mother that it had taken a whole week to write those few lines, and that no other writing had been done during that week. He asked her how she felt about that. Did she mind the fact that her daughter only wrote a few lines in a whole week? She replied that she had spent all her life never writing lines like that, so her daughter only taking a few days to do it was a wonder, not a worry.

In conclusion, drama aids thinking because it has the same goal as that of all cognition-to understand, to gain a larger perspective on, and to engage more profoundly with the world. This is the goal of foreign-language teaching at its best, and it should be no surprise that for reaching this goal, drama is a highly effective teaching strategy.

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