Don’t Just Read Literature, Experience It

Give students the chance to move — intellectually, physically and emotionally — into the world of a text.

DR. ADELE BRUNI ASHLEY
Faculty Contributor

​We begin our session with an exercise borrowed from Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts. Players (our term for students and teachers who are in creative collaboration with each other) disperse throughout the room facing in any direction and are invited to move silently about the room at their own pace without collision, always passing through the center of the room en route to another side (rather than merely circling the periphery). Welcome to the act of milling and seething.
 
The purpose of this introductory activity is twofold: first, to foster an awareness of space. All too often in school, students are aware of neither the classroom as a physical space nor themselves and their peers as bodies coexisting within that space. Milling and seething prompts students to examine the entirety of the classroom space; at points, the facilitator leading the activity claps and says, “Look around. Are there any empty places in the room? When I clap again, move to fill them.” Students thus begin to notice the gaps and spaces within the room at any given time and to understand their responsibility to venture out and fill those gaps and spaces. And because of the mandate that they move through the center of the room as they mill and seethe, students must negotiate encounters with one another. They must become aware of where their individual bodies end and the bodies of others begin.

Second, to ease players into imaginative work without any burden of “performance.” There exists no audience in this exercise; all are players. Players need only follow the directions of the facilitator (“When I clap, pause wherever you are. When I clap again, begin moving.”), and these directions shift subtly as the exercise progresses. While at first, the facilitator might ask players to “speed up (or slow down) by 50%, whatever that means to you,” directions ultimately become more like this one: “Pause. You have somewhere important to be. You’re late. When I clap again, get there.” Even with this simple direction, the players start to move into imaginative worlds. 

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Reimagining texts and teaching

The Literacy Unbound initiative, the driving force behind this session, was originally conceived as a grand experiment in teacher education that sought to encourage instructors to consider the power of artistic play as an opportunity to help students develop as critical, collaborative, creative readers. At its core, Literacy Unbound seeks to reinvigorate students and teachers through project-based, collaborative curricula developed around challenging texts. Throughout this process, we often witness increased student engagement and the development of a stronger classroom community.

By bringing students and teachers together as creative collaborators, we’re able to reimagine the acts of reading, writing, listening, and speaking through multiple modalities. Though various aspects of this process can change, the core principles always remain the same:

• Begin with movement. Establish a precedent for movement in your classroom early on so students become accustomed to shifting quickly between sitting and walking in the classroom (and pushing desks and tables aside as needed). And be sure that this movement is low stakes. When leading classroom workshops like this one, I often start by saying, “Now, I’m going to ask you to do the most difficult thing I’ll ask you to do all day. When I clap, walk. When I clap again, stop. What questions do you have?” There is laughter when I say this, and students almost instantaneously relax. All they need to do is walk together.

 

• Keep returning to the text. In many classrooms, any kind of movement activity is treated as entirely separate from an “official reading” of the text at hand: one day, we read the text and the next, we do the movement activity (or vice versa). We try to find ways in our classroom workshops of incorporating the text into the movement — of reading with a pen in hand during the same class period in which we mill and seethe. When we ask students to integrate text into their movement in some way, we give them only small pieces with which to work — a word, a phrase, a line. We build larger ideas through an examination of the smaller pieces. 

 

• Compose through movement. All too often, educators use movement to re-present ideas already formed. What we attempt to do in our workshops is craft opportunities for students to discover ideas through movement and then put those ideas into words.

 

• Build the world of the text. As much as possible, we work to “coach students into story,” inviting them into the world of the text in some way. We might approach this by coaching students through guided visualization, or the act of letter writing; in general, we want to offer students sensory details (or sensory questions: What does it smell like? What’s on the walls?) that might help them to step into both textual environments and characters. Prompting students to write in character (or in some other way that makes sense within the given text) then enables them to build that textual world still further.
  
  

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Why does this work? 

Through this approach, students get the chance to move — intellectually, physically and emotionally — into the world of the text. So frequently, we talk about text in the classroom. By contrast, our process allows students to talk from within the text; they speak directly from the perspective of one character and then another. They can feel the story in ways that might not otherwise be possible. At Literacy Unbound, we believe strongly that rich meaning-making happens when we find ways to experience literature together in the classroom.