This chapter explores the integration of theater with literacy practices in a socially conscious, activist, engaged, and liberatory pedagogy. The work presents four case studies and is built upon theories and concepts of experiential learning, play, socially engaged pedagogy, funds of knowledge, and applied theater. The chapter invites educators to consider theater as available and accessible to all, encouraging a flexible approach to teaching and learning that strengthens agency and is a powerful way to engage students. Through discussion of theory and praxis, the authors consider opportunities to connect with communities, heritage, and history to support students as they imagine, read, critically analyze, communicate, and transform their worlds.
“The command of reading and writing is achieved beginning with words and themes meaningful to the common experience of those becoming literate.” (Freire, 1987, p. 42)
“We find the sense of life through articulating it.” (Taylor, 1989, p. 18)
TopIntroduction
Literacy is a human right, a crucial tool for making sense of the world. A narrow, though essential, understanding of literacy is the ability to read and write. The “literate” person should be capable of decoding words written on the page. This limited definition hints at a skills-oriented approach and an implicit ideology, wherein ‘teachers’ impart preexisting knowledge to passive ‘learners’ who are equipped thereby to participate in – assimilate into - the status quo. But a more expansive view, forcefully articulated by pedagogues from Paulo Freire to bell hooks, describes literacy as a creative process of deciphering, meaning making, analyzing and in its critical sense, rewriting the world. Both Freire and hooks share “a holistic approach addressing mind, body and spirit,” in which educators “share in the intellectual and spiritual growth of our students.” (hooks, 2014, p. 13). They advocate for an engaged pedagogy, which posits ‘reading the world’ as a necessary precursor to reading the word.
As Freire and Macedo assert, literacy is “best understood as a myriad of discursive forms and cultural competencies that construct and make available the various relations and experiences that exist between learners and the world” (1987, p. 10). There are all kinds of texts that come in multiple forms. We ‘read’ visual images, expressive gestures, bodies, cultures, and narratives in many modes. To be literate is to have the skills to ‘read’ the world as a text in the multiple ways that the world presents itself to us. Freire and Macedo go on to surmise, “[r]eading does not consist merely of decoding the written word or language; rather, it is preceded by and intertwined with knowledge of the world. Language and reality are dynamically interconnected” (1987, p.29). Kalantzis and Cope (2012) offer a pedagogy of “multiliteracies” which utilize and synthesize many modalities and technologies including the digital world that our students increasingly occupy. In fact, we read the world through many lenses; there are many approaches to – and kinds of – literacy, through which we understand and engage with the world.
This chapter will address theater as a literacy practice with diverse communities, across a range of differences, including, but not limited to, underserved and often silenced communities. Four projects that use story-making and performing are described in detail. The projects, in varying degrees, strengthen reading, writing and interpersonal skills, creative problem-solving, critical and dialogic thinking, community-building, and powerfully, finding one’s voice. Above all, the work offers the rare opportunity for play.