ABSTRACT
The idea of allowing your students to engage in “acting it out” might seem a bit intimidating, especially if you haven’t had firsthand theatre experiences yourself. But, are you familiar with the scenario of students sitting quietly at their desks reading and rereading passages from a text without increased comprehension or with much personal engagement? If so, you might be motivated to try some new approaches that demand deeper student engagement. In this book, we want to inspire you to take an active approach to working with dramatic literature in your classroom. This approach borrows techniques from an actor’s toolkit and uses theater rehearsal methods to help students closely read a text, make personal connections to it, and work as a team to bring that text to life through classroom scene showings. We will share our experiences through the lens of TimeLine Theatre Company’s Living History Program, an arts integration theater residency, which pairs non-fiction research and theater rehearsal techniques with reading dramatic texts to challenge students to “step into” another era or set of social circumstances. We have found, time and time again, that using simple, specific theater-based techniques to get students connected with their bodies and voices can breathe new life into studying plays. We hope that by the end of this chapter, you’ll see that a well-structured theater-based unit can help you address Common Core Standards in an invigorating, creative, and surprising way.
