Transforming Teaching and Learning with Active and Dramatic Approaches

by Brian Edmiston

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2014! How can teachers transform classroom teaching and learning by making pedagogy more socially and culturally responsive, more relevant to students’ lives, and more collaborative? How can they engage disaffected students in learning and at the same time promote deep understanding though high-quality teaching that goes beyond test preparation? This text for prospective and practicing teachers introduces engaging, innovative pedagogy for putting active and dramatic approaches to learning and teaching into action. Written in an accessible, conversational, and refreshingly honest style by a teacher and professor with over 30 years' experience, it features real examples of preschool, elementary, middle, and high school teachers working in actual classrooms in diverse settings. Their tales explore not only how, but also why, they have changed the way they teach. Photographs and stories of their classroom practice, along with summarizing charts of principles and strategies, both illuminate the critical, cross-curricular, and inquiry-based conceptual framework Edmiston develops and provide rich examples and straightforward guidelines that can support readers as they experiment with using active and dramatic approaches to dialogue, inquiry, building community, planning for exploration, and authentic assessment in their own classrooms.

Genres: Education

368 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2013

Reviews

[Kevin Cordi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Within ten minutes, I knew Dr. Brian Edmiston’s class was unlike any other graduate teacher education pedagogy class I had ever attended.

We studied the life of the first African American pilot, Bessie Coleman---not simply by reading her story, but instead, by experiencing events in her life using fictional roles to create dramatic episodes within the space of the classroom. Without a stage or props we transformed the university language arts and social studies methods classroom into a fictional place, the cultural and historical environment of Bessie Coleman. Edmiston invited us to enter this world by using our collective imaginations and soon the classroom was transported into the fictional landscape. This terrain was dramatic but also real because as a class we imagined and enacted it. Mediated by Edmiston, this landscape became an ideal place to learn. Together we were able to address and inquire into the sensitive issue of racial discrimination by examining racism during the Jim Crow Era. Drawing from the vignettes of her life contained in the book (2002) Talkin' About Bessie: The Story of Aviator Elizabeth Coleman by Nikki Grimes, Edmiston used dramatic episodes to enact various perspectives and positions in the world of Bessie Coleman. As we took on various fictional roles, we heard testimony from black and white news reporters, family members, and neighbors. We then took up the perspective of those neighbors or reporters. In role, I served as a white flight instructor who had to inform Bessie she was not allowed to fly in the United States. My entire body tensed as I shared this and confronted Edimston-as-Bessie. Later we experienced and inquired into other events including when Bessie was welcomed in France where she could obtain a license and during her turbulent flying career.

Later that semester, we worked together with this same narrative in a diverse classroom of fourth graders. I watched young minds struggle as I had done when Bessie had to leave for Paris because of discrimination in the United States that would not authorize her as a pilot. Brian navigated us into a conversation about some of the cultural reasons why she could not fly. Both White and Black students alike addressed race relations not from detached positions, but together from multiple viewpoints within the fictional world that deepened our subsequent conversation and reflection.

I recognized many of the principles that had guided Edmiston’s teaching when I read this text. IT is powerful, riveting, and a necessary text for anyone who wants to inspire authentic learning with, not just for, their students In university and school classrooms alike, I have been using this pedagogy for the past 10 years in my position as a university literacy professor. Thank you Brian for sharing this powerful pedagogy that has transformed my teaching and me personally.