Drama!
Drama! The word conjures excitement, emotion, enthusiasm, energy, and if you want all that on steroids, I recommend attending a drama workshop with a class of 3rd graders. Bonus points if you do so at 8:30 in the morning, which is to say I had definitely made room in my schedule for a nap later.
I got to tag along with Behind the Book’s program coordinator, Keturah Abdullah, and BtB’s new drama teacher, Karen Butler, when they brought the drama to a BtB classroom at P.S. 197 in Harlem. BtB staff had been thinking for a while about how/whether to incorporate drama into some of our programs and finally the stars aligned this school year, so Karen had been working with our programming team to discuss, design, and develop workshop sessions that use motion and other dramatic techniques to more deeply engage the students with the book around which their program centers.
This particular class was working with The Amazingly Awesome Amani, by Jamiyl & Tracy-Ann Samuels. Karen dazzled me with some fancy academic language to explain how drama can help with reading and writing, saying that for learners “who struggle with normative ways of learning—reading and writing—drama allows them to access and internalize the information in another way.” She gave me the example of a science class which she organized to act out the human digestive system: students got to feel and experience the digestive process, which gave them a physical, kinesthetic way to understand it. NB that I refrained from asking her about what, exactly, was acted out, but my guess is there was a lot of laughter in that class that day.
Speaking of laughter, have you ever tried to get 18 eight-year-olds into a circle? Karen’s challenge was compounded by the way the classroom was set up, desks scattered in groups of two and three around the room, but there wasn’t time or really space to rearrange the furniture, so she worked with what she had. Karen has great energy, she’s one of those adults who talks to students directly, no fake sing-songy voices or talking down to them. She‘s also got a great classroom voice, which may seem like an odd compliment but—especially in an elementary school—it’s a powerful tool.
Karen first led a game of Zip Zap Zop, and if you’ve never played, I strongly encourage you to give it a whirl. It’ll burn off whatever excess energy you’ve got and the laughter that kind of silliness generates is a terrific ab workout. Building from Zip Zap Zop, Karen took the class through a series of cleverly scaffolded activities that culminated in groups of students acting out dramatic scenes in which they were superheroes, using their superpowers to defeat an evil villain, all of which led them to a deeper engagement with the anchor text for the program.
The Amazingly Awesome Amani is about a kid who is quiet and shy during the day but at night, in his dreams, becomes a superhero crime fighter and “defender of all good things.” To get our kids started on the concept of superpowers, Karen asked them to assume Amani’s pose from the cover of the book—it’s a classic superhero power pose, hands on hips, chest out, chin up, and as I watched these third-graders channeling their inner superheroes, I actually laughed out loud in delight at this one kid who stepped into his pose, twitching his (imaginary) cape out of the way, and I knew that he could feel it swirling out behind him. If ever I doubted that a drama program could help students get to know a book better, those doubts would have been swept away in the flutter of that cape.
After warming up with the idea of what a superpower is and how posing like Amani helped students articulate how he felt as a superhero, our students came up with their own superpowers and then decided on a pose that would capture what their superpower looked like. Karen went around the room, calling on students to shout their superpower and show us their pose. This where her years of experience in theater and her master’s degree in theater education were especially helpful, as we all needed a lot of suspension of disbelief and a whole ton of “Yes, and?”
Here’s how this went, and you have to imagine the dialogue spoken rapid-fire, no pauses, Karen’s pacing pushing the kids not to think too hard, not to slow down and let rational thought or anything else equally useless intrude on this creative exercise, the kids rapt and vibrating with readiness for her to call on them next.
“What’s! Your! Superpower!”Karen asked every kid this in a shouty-excited way, like the kid was going to respond by saying we were all getting new cars.“What’s your superpower!”“Ballet,” the first girl said proudly, as she stuck a dancer’s pose.“Awesome! You’re a super dancer!” Karen was on to the next kid: “What’s your superpower!” “I’m a plane!” He stuck out his arm-wings and swooped; we all paused for a moment and thought on this, but yeah, if you can turn into a plane, that’s a superpower, dude: go for it.“Okay! What’s your superpower!”“I help the community!” This boy was a little tentative, but he knew he was onto something. Karen rolled right into a yes, and…?“Okay, cool, how do you do that?”“Um, by bringing them food and drinks?”“That’s your superpower, you bring food and drinks to people!” The boy nodded in agreement, pleased, and then we were off again.“You! What’s your superpower!”“Dancing! I can make people happy by dancing!” She pointed to the top of her head and said firmly, “Yup, dancing!”“Nice! You’re a super dancer, too! What’s your superpower!”“Halloween!” There was another tiny pause, even Karen can be surprised, but again she kept going.“Okay! How is that a superpower?”This kid appeared as confused by his superpower as we were, but we eventually figured out that his superpower was dressing up and making people happy, which—good news, kid!—is not limited to one day a year!“Okay, you! What’s your superpower!”“The police?” The girl’s voice was shy, like she was pretty sure she didn’t have the right answer but also didn’t have another one. But Karen was on a roll now.“Okay! How is that a superpower?”
We finally discovered her SP was helping the police, and on and on it went until we had 18 superheroes with a diverse and intriguing set of superpowers, and each superhero had a power pose that exemplified their superpower. The kid whose SP was running really fast posed as the Running Man, valiantly running in place, his statue a perpetual motion machine. “He got issues,” a boy next to him said not unkindly, but from my vantage it didn’t look that way at all—it looked like he was doing just fine.
Eighteen eight-year-olds, even those who are supposed to be statues, can occasionally lose the plot, and I marveled at the way Keturah and Karen brought their focus back every time. Nobody yelled or shouted, just chanted something and immediately the kids would get quiet and chant right back and I wonder how many of them, twenty or more years from now, will hear “Shhh” and instinctively listen for a pattern of shhhs to follow. “Stop, look, and listen” is another good chant, and to that one the students respond “Okay!” in unison, just in case you were wondering whether a third-grade classroom can occasionally feel like a surreal experience. (Yes.)
The hour flew by, at least for me—there was just so! much! happening! The kids were flickering into and out of superhero poses, occasionally accompanied by superhero-appropriate ki-yahs. There was so much giggling, the constant sound of chairs wiggling and scraping the floor, a kid near me gently tapping an empty Gatorade bottle against his forehead, all around the room little hands slapping desks to some internal rhythm. Amidst this, Karen held them together, kept the class focused and moving forward.
Finally, when we had 18 superheroes with superpowers and matching poses, Karen gave us a villain—Pollution Man—and a problem: Pollution Man was threatening to destroy a beloved (imaginary) local park. The kids gathered around and Karen sorted them into smaller groups and each group came up with a plan for how they would work together to defeat Pollution Man and save the park.
The super strong kid was nominated to team up with the kid who was a plane: the strong kid would gather up all the garbage in the park and load it onto the plane that (who?) would fly it away. A girl eating a can of sour cream and onion pringles had some very pragmatic ideas for how to use the web-shooting kid’s powers to tackle and wrap up Pollution Man; she volunteered to distract Pollution Man with her super dancing so the web-kid could get at him. Other kids were going to build shelters for (imaginary) homeless people in the (imaginary) park, and the kid who helped people was going to bring them food and drinks. At some point the homeless population expanded to include some (imaginary) homeless cats, and they got folded into this plan too, new kitty houses added to the super-builder’s plate.
Plans in place, Karen selected a kid to play Pollution Man for the first dramatic enactment. She, Pollution Man, was one of the super dancers. She was wearing black pants with sequins down the side and a sweatshirt dominated by a brightly-colored heart. Pollution Man’s evilness was therefore undermined both by her adorable outfit and her uncontrollable laughter, but the superheroes were undaunted. I could see the payoff of the careful scaffolding Karen had done, all that recursive repetition: each group of kids approached Pollution Man and rained down a stream of superpowers and super poses and over and over again Pollution Man was vanquished and the kids returned to the circle, breathless and triumphant, so the next group of superheroes could have a go.
Finally, Pollution Man was gone and the park had been cleaned up and the homeless people and the homeless cats all had new shelters, refreshing food and drink, access to a kid who was a plane, and entertainment in the form of super dancers plus the kid who dressed up and made people happy. Everyone was panting and bright-cheeked and eager to jump into one last pose at the front of the room for a picture. As they took their places, big grins or superhero-stern faces, there was suddenly a moment of total quiet, the only moment of silence in the entire hour. The absence of noise was startling in its intensity and as I watched these kids quivering with the effort it took to hold their poses, I realized this was it: they were feeling their superpowers, like, for real.
Finally one couldn’t help it any longer and shouted delightedly, “Okay!” The rest all broke their poses, collapsing into more laughter and ki-yahs and one last stationary sprint by the Running Man, and then they were back to their desks, about to be regular eight-year-olds again.
But before they shrugged off their superhero identities completely, Karen asked the kids what the next step was in their BtB program. I think it was actually the girl who could see into the future who answered first: they were going to write and illustrate their own superhero story.
“That’s right,” Karen responded encouragingly, “and how will what we did today help you with that?”
And here’s the thing: a dozen or more hands flew into the air, these little kids giving answers that included—verbatim!—the phrases: “I got to think like a superhero,” and “it gave me ideas for my story!”
On our way into the classroom, a hundred years/sixty minutes prior, I had asked Karen about how she’d come up with her plan for the day and what it was like working with the other program coordinators to find the right way to integrate drama into their classes. I loved the thoughtful process she described, but in the hilarious chaos of the past hour I had almost missed the most important thing, which is how the workshop activities connected the students to the book and the larger program goals.
But what I realized, as Karen and Keturah chatted with the kids about how they would draw their poses and what it felt like to be a super builder or a super dancer or a plane, the kids responding eagerly, “I can hit the hammer really fast,” “I can twirl a million times in a row,” “I can fly over everything,” was that the act of inhabiting their characters had given the students a deeper and more physical, more authentic, connection to those characters. They understood Amani better now, too—they knew what it meant to strike a pose and feel a superpower, a superhero, coiling inside.
Then it was 9:30 and we were grabbing our coats and waving goodbye and the kids were going back to their desks and whatever was next for them on this Thursday morning. I followed Karen and Keturah outside and badgered them with questions, mostly about that thing that happened at the end of the class where Karen helped the kids draw the explicit connections between reading and acting and drawing and writing.
Karen was as patient with me as she’d been with the third graders, explaining that it’s all well and good to play games, but if the students can’t connect those experiences to the larger project, well, then, you’re just playing games. Writing, she pointed out to me, is a lot like acting—it involves being able to put yourself in other people’s shoes. For an hour that morning I’d seen kids putting on the shoes of superheroes, and I could see in them the difference they felt when they did. The Amazingly Awesome Amani told students what it was like to be a superhero; Karen’s activities helped them feel the wind in their capes, the power in their poses, the limitless potential in their heads and their hands. That hour had everything: excitement, emotion, enthusiasm, energy: it was high drama, indeed.
And then, though all I could think was nap, I had to get home to write this down, to try to capture the moment I realized I’d been a participant in the workshop, too. For, after all, what I wanted to try to write about was what I felt about the experience itself, the excitement, emotion, enthusiasm, energy that stirred me as much as it did the rest of the class. Karen gave us the space and the tools to be able to feel, and those feelings gave us all something deeper to draw on to write about.
There was more than a little bit of magic in that classroom that day, and while I can’t swear to it, I’m pretty certain that just as I turned away toward the B train, Karen and Keturah bent their knees, grinned, and shot up into the sky to join a suspiciously low-flying/small plane that looked a lot like a kid. Then—boogie-woogie music trailing—they all disappeared into the wild blue yonder.
by Casey Cornelius
More of Casey’s writing is on her personal blog, here.