ATEQ - The Association of Teachers of English of Quebec

Workshops

Enhancing Reading Comprehension Through Improvised Drama : workshop by Professor David Dillon, Faculty of Education, McGill University.

The Purpose of this experiential workshop is to train participants in Story Drama, an approach to improvisational drama designed to enhance children's comprehension of stories by fostering personal response to literature and critical thinking. Professor Dillon lead a Story Drama session for participants and provided an explanation/discussion of key principles of the approach in order to enable participants to implement the approach themselves with stories they use with pupils in their own classrooms.

Story Drama

Goal: to deepen students' aesthetic experience with a story (a deeper, “felt” experience of the human issues in the story) and to enable reflection (more distanced, “cooler” perspective) on these basic human issues or themes. (This approach tries to counter the frequent tendency in children's self-directed group play toward fast-moving action on the surface, rather than deepened reflection and awareness, including awareness of self and one's experience in the world.)

Steps and Leader's Role

1. Participants encounter a story in common – hear, viewed, or especially read.
2. It is usually helpful to discuss the story, as a way for participants to begin to stimulate their sense-making together and for a teacher to gauge the group's interest in the story and the issues they are seeing in it. (My approach is to leading discussion about a story is to foster individual sense making and collective diversity of interpretation and perspective – often referred to as “personal response to literature”).
3. The teacher suggests a particular scene to play, with specified roles for the participants collectively and usually for the teacher too. This step is based on the following principles :
   • The scene is usually not in the original story, but is obviously related to it, plausible, etc. It is suitable for a larger group of students and often creates new characters.
   • The scene is designed to reveal (1) a key problem or conflict to be dealt with (literal level – creates dramatic tension) and (2) one or more universal human issues that participants saw in the original story (deeper level – prompts reflection).
   • The teacher usually plays a key role in the drama, (1) to be able to press participants toward decisions and (2) to pose questions fostering deeper reflection.
   • The scene will end with some resolution of the dramatic tension, but the ending is often less important than the fact that issues were explored and hopefully felt during the playing.

1. Preparation for playing tries to avoid over-preparation, thus leaving room for participants to “fill in” their roles and move toward decisions. However, some preliminary discussion of context and character is usually helpful. The most helpful aspect of preparing for role is considering the characters' motivations .
2. Play the scene. Choose a role that allows the leader (1) to present students with a problem to solve, an issue to resolve, etc. (2) to draw attention to and foster reflection on the central human issue or theme, and (3) to try to slow down the action while seeming to keep it going (balance reflection and action). Go in and out of role if necessary or helpful.
3. After the playing, it is usually helpful to have a discussion looking back at the playing, but especially at the key human issues that were explored in the playing, what was learned or clarified about them, etc. Other means of response are writing, art, etc.

“A reader who has discovered what words on a page actually are – distilled human experience – has cracked the code forever.” - Betty Jane Wagner

Reference

Booth, David (2003) Story Drama (Second Edition). Markham , On: Pembroke Publishers.

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