In Making Books Sing Residencies, our teaching artists lead students in acting, playwriting and songwriting workshops to adapt a children’s book into an original play.
Before the teaching artists step foot in a classroom, we prepare them with the tools necessary to use our curriculum in professional development workshops. In this professional development, we encourage the teaching artists to use the student’s own original language as they create the script and lyrics in the playwriting and songwriting workshops. In this process, students are prompted to activate their prior knowledge and be the sole creators of their work. This sets up a “mantle of the expert” tone for the classroom, where the students will hopefully feel ownership over the finished product.
Lisa Delpit, American Educationalist and Author, notes the need for addressing student’s choice language in her book, Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom. She states, “Teachers need to support the language that students bring to school, provide them input from an additional code, and give them the opportunity to use the new code in a nonthreatening, real communicative context.”
While we use all of the student’s inventive language, the teaching artist still conveys all of the elements of a well-written play: inciting incident, conflict, resolution, action, high stakes, low stakes. By taking the student’s words and plugging them into the framework, the teaching artists create a balance of freedom and structure to incorporate new ideas into the traditional structure of a play.
Delpit suggests that instructors teach Standard English and its importance for success in student’s lives, but that they do not need to constantly correct the cultural language that the students speak in the classroom. Instead, they should celebrate and embrace the various cultural contexts of the words that their students speak. She states, “that they must be allowed the resource of the teacher’s expert knowledge, while being helped to acknowledge their own “expertness” as well.”
Here at Making Books Sing, the students are the acting, playwriting and songwriting “experts” of our residencies.
