Teachers Act Up Creating Multicultural Learning Communities Through Theatre

If teachers want to create positive change in the lives of their students, then they must first be able to create positive change in their own lives. This book describes a powerful professional development approach that merges the scholarship of critical pedagogy with the Theatre of the Oppressed. Participants "act up" in order to explore real-life scenarios and rehearse difficult conversations they are likely to have with colleagues, students, administrators, and parents. The authors have practiced the theatrical strategies presented here with pre- and in-service teachers in numerous contexts, including college courses, professional development seminars, and PreK–12 classrooms. They include step-by-step instructions with vivid photographs to help readers use these revolutionary theatre strategies in their own contexts for a truly unique learning experience.

This unique book features an array of approaches, strategies, and tools for teaching multiculturally in the early years. The teachers and classrooms portrayed here provide young children with rich educational experiences that empower them to understand themselves in relation to others. You will see how amazing teachers engage in culturally responsive teaching that fosters educational equity while also meeting state and national standards (such as the Common Core State Standards). This engaging book is sprinkled with questions for reflection and implementation that encourage educators to start planning ways of enhancing their own teaching, making their early childhood setting a more equitable learning space. Book Features: Multicultural education in action,including the everyday issues and tensions experienced by children and their families. Powerful vignettes from diverse Head Start, preschool, kindergarten, 1st- and 2nd-grade classrooms throughout the United States. Sections on “Getting Started” and “Considering Obstacles and Exploring Possibilities” in each chapter. A list of multicultural children’s books and resources for further reading. Chapters: Multicultural Tools and Strategies for Teaching Young Children Multicultural Education as Transformative Education Interviews: Encouraging Children to Ask Questions Critical Inquiry: Supporting Children’s Investigations Culture Circles with Multicultural Literature: Addressing Issues of Fairness Community Resources and Home Literacies: Developing Funds of Knowledge Technology: Media(ting) Multicultural Teaching Storytelling and Story Acting: Creating Spaces for Children to Negotiate Change Reflecting on the Possibilities of Teaching Multiculturally: What Next? What If? Mariana Souto-Manning is Associate Professor of Education in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University. “A profound, rich, and rewarding meditation and deep conversation with teachers fully engaging young children with culture, social history, and learning for the future. This wide-ranging book escapes temporal, spatial, and disciplinary boundaries. Read it and reflect on how you can take it into your own life of learning.” —Shirley Brice Heath, Professor Emerita, Stanford University “Early childhood educators will experience this unique book as a warm and detailed invitation to engage in multicultural education. The emphasis throughout is on “multi”—multiple pedagogical approaches, from culture circles to podcasts to story acting, and multiple cultural heritages embodied by active children and teachers. From a critical perspective and alongside creative teachers who aspire to be transformative, Souto-Manning links accessible theory with rich and thoughtful practices.” —Celia Genishi, Professor of Education, Teachers College, Columbia University “Mariana Souto-Manning’s Multicultural Teaching in the Early Childhood Classroom rightly places the use of deficit thinking and ineffective teaching strategies in the wasteland of classroom instruction. The author superbly documents and explains ways of teaching multiculturally that will richly benefit the learning of all students and make teaching become the fun that teachers dreamed it would be when they first said, ‘I want to teach because I love kids.’” —Carl A. Grant, Hoefs-Bascom Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison “Multicultural Teaching in the Early Childhood Classroom encourages teachers to honor, affirm, and challenge even our very youngest children to think inclusively, critically, and democratically—a necessity if we are to help develop knowledgeable, caring, and empowered learners.” —Sonia Nieto, Professor Emerita, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

The Routledge Companion to Drama in Education is a comprehensive reference guide to this unique performance discipline, focusing on its process-oriented theatrical techniques, engagement of a broad spectrum of learners, its historical roots as a field of inquiry and its transdisciplinary pedagogical practices. The book approaches drama in education (DE) from a wide range of perspectives, from leading scholars to teaching artists and school educators who specialise in DE teaching. It presents the central disciplinary conversations around key issues, including best practice in DE, aesthetics and artistry in teaching, the histories of DE, ideologies in drama and education, and concerns around access, inclusivity and justice. Including reflections, lesson plans, programme designs, case studies and provocations from scholars, educators and community arts workers, this is the most robust and comprehensive resource for those interested in DE’s past, present and future.

This book explores tools and techniques for creating the arts with groups. It provides insights into why workshops are such an effective and relevant form of creative practice. Throughout, two experienced practitioners share successful principles and qualities. They also include examples of workshops that explore ways of facilitating creative exploration. The authors believe that underpinning any good workshop practice is an understanding of what constitutes a workshop. This is a process in which the relationship between artist/researcher and participant/audience, maker, and witness is fluid. It extends each individual’s abilities and connects doing to learning to inquiring in a single process. The book itself is a dialogue on, and an investigation into, this practice. It fully explores the specificities of workshop practice in relation to how it engages others in arts-based research. Readers learn how workshops involve inquiry into six areas: inquiry into subjects, artistic processes, skills, self, the world, and relationships with others. In the end, this informed investigation helps practitioners to better reflect on their own approaches to arts-based inquiry and research. This, in turn, leads to a better understanding of how readers can use workshops for the maximum benefit of all participants, both individuals and groups.

The Arts and Emergent Bilingual Youth offers a critical sociopolitical perspective on working with emerging bilingual youth at the intersection of the arts and language learning. Utilizing research from both arts and language education to explore the ways they work in tandem to contribute to emergent bilingual students’ language and academic development, the book analyzes model arts projects to raise questions about “best practices” for and with marginalized bilingual young people, in terms of relevance to their languages, cultures, and communities as they envision better worlds. A central assumption is that the arts can be especially valuable for contributing to English learning by enabling learners to experience ideas, patterns, and relationship (form) in ways that lead to new knowledge (content). Each chapter features vignettes showcasing current projects with ELL populations both in and out of school and visual art pieces and poems, to prompt reflection on key issues and relevant concepts and theories in the arts and language learning. Taking a stance about language and culture in English learners’ lives, this book shows the intimate connections among art, narrative, and resistance for addressing topics of social injustice.

This book highlights the unique and co-generative intersections of the arts and literacy that promote critical and socially engaged teaching and learning. Based on a year-long ethnography with two literacy teachers and their students in an arts-based public high school, this volume makes an argument for arts-based education as the cultivation of a critical aesthetic practice in the literacy classroom. Through rich example and analysis, it shows how, over time, this practice alters the in-school learning space in significant ways by making it more constructivist, more critical, and fundamentally more relational.

This book explores the relationship between social justice practices and the Arts in Education. It argues that social justice practices, at their best, should awaken our senses and the ability to imagine alternatives that can sustain the collective work necessary to challenge entrenched patterns and practices. Chapters display a range of arts-based pedagogies for challenging oppressive practices in schools, community centers and other public sites. The examples provided illustrate both the promise and on-going challenge of enacting arts based social justice practices that can transform consciousness and organize action toward justice and social change. They show the power of arts-based pedagogies to engage the imagination, reveal invisible operations of power and privilege, provoke critical reflection, and spark alternative images and possibilities. They also show the importance of on-going critical reflection for this work with attention to both the specificities of place and the obstacles (internal and external) to maintaining a social justice stance in the face of contemporary neoliberal discourses. This book was originally published as a special issue of Equity & Excellence in Education.

This volume provides a critical approach to using focus groups, examining how focus groups have been utilized to research a diverse set of research questions covering a broad spectrum of substantive fields. The collection acknowledges the tensions between different research traditions, disciplinary emphases, funding climates, cultural, political, and ethical contexts, and the ever-changing policy backdrop. Contributors to this book encourage researchers to question and surmount disciplinary and terminological labels and disputes in order to capitalize on the full potential of focus groups, to illuminate the complex collaborative processes involved in forming, debating, contesting, and revising opinions; making decisions; and forging identities. The four sections that comprise this collection address, respectively, using focus groups in novel contexts; employing focus groups in mixed methods research designs; innovations in generating focus group data; and new theoretical developments. A New Era in Focus Group Research will be of interest to students and scholars across disciplines as well as focus group practitioners outside of academia.