Improvisational Drama for Social Justice:A Methodology for High Schools by Darri Colton and Barbara Sorenson, Thetford Academy -Thetford, Vermont “We made Mrs. Stone cry! ” Our students couldn’t get over this fact. They were awed --and elated. Mrs. Stone, their German teacher, that formidable, exacting woman they’d assumed must have a heart to match her name, had just been moved to tears by their performance. Their “Alternative Columbus Day ” program, presented to a small audience of friends and teachers at our rural New England high school, had gone beyond instruction and consciousness-raising to powerful connection. Mrs. Stone cried, and the students suddenly saw themselves, their subject, and this member of their audience in a new light. They didn’t know what she had told us, her colleagues: that she had tribal heritage of her own. But the students understood that Mrs. Stone was a human being who shared their concerns. She had joined their circle. As the teachers, we too stood in awe of the program’s power--and it was a familiar feeling. Again and again, we have seen the transforming synergy of literature, drama, and social justice issues emerge in students’ work. The themes vary, and each culminating performance is unique, but there is a pattern in the process. In reflecting on our experiences, we have discovered how that process developed over the past five years, and we can begin to define its essential elements for others. We work in a small independent academy that serves as a public high school for several Vermont towns. The school has a long history of involvement with both the work ethic and the service ethic of our primarily rural communities. In recent years, we have seen these values severely threatened by a changing economy and culture. The rewards of hard work and voluntary service are less visible to young people. Stable community networks based in mutual care and tolerance are shrinking. Increasingly, this value system must compete with a national media culture that promotes a glamorous but elusive materialism, and celebrates violence and disrespect. We aim to provide a strong and active alternative to this negative culture, starting with the daily practice of teaching and learning in our classroom. First and most important, we teach as a team. Each of us has different strengths, and each is a resource--a source, a “text,” a model--for the other. Darri’s field is improvisational drama: knowing how to be a performer, how to develop an ensemble, how to include a creative element in everything we do. Barb’s field is language arts: knowing how to choose inspiring literature, how to develop a range of writing assignments, how to advocate for individuals’ voices and make sure everyone within a group is heard. Both of us know how to give students room, and how to give up control. Each time we teach a course together, our partnership is the beginning of a community. We started out the “Women’s Literature” course this year with the intention of producing student autobiographies. We planned to read Mary Crow Dog’s Lakota Woman and Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. The students got so interested in Native American experience after reading Lakota Woman though, that we spent the whole first term learning more about that experience. We begin with literature. Our choices come from the course topic (Women’s Literature, Literature of Diversity, Sports Literature) and from our own interests and concerns. What we read stimulates our thinking. We then design varied writing assignments--from very structured formal essays to very personal reflections--that connect the reading to students’ life experiences. This creates a context and frame of reference for all that follows. We write all assignments along with the students, and share our writing with the group just as they do. We believe this is essential to developing the sense that everyone who’s there is a resource. We read and presented selections from Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. We invited local Abenaki historians to our class, and at their suggestion watched the documentary “Incident at Oglala.” We read Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees, articles from the journal Rethinking Columbus, and writing by young Native Americans in the collection Rising Voices. We wrote about our grandmothers and our mothers. We wrote twenty-minute essays (for SAT practice) on the quotation: “The past is not dead; it is not even past.” We wrote our own examples of humor and autobiography while analyzing Kingsolver’s style. Each of us kept a collection of our writings in a folder. We then introduce the element of drama as another way to communicate ideas. Theater exercises promote awareness of ourselves as a community, a group of people with shared experiences who are learning to trust and respect each other. Through drama, we continue to take the risk of sharing personal stories. This develops awareness of ourselves as presenters, storytellers who have a message to communicate. Each week we learned and practiced improvisational performance techniques. Drama exercises helped students learn how to give and take focus on stage. In one exercise, small groups of students formed freeze-frame sculptures, or snapshots. Each student picked one phrase from their writing, and themes emerged that determined the group sculptures. These sculptures provided transition points in our final performance. In order to recognize the importance of ritual and ceremony in Native American culture, we created our own ceremony. When two students found a dead bird outside our window, they buried it in the woods, and we declared the next day “Bir Ad Day.” We invited the Head of School, our “clan mother,” to join us. Each of us brought something having to do with birds to our ceremony, with a processional out to the gravesite and a circle for sharing stories, poems, artifacts, and a group recitation. As we returned to school, a hawk flew overhead. When we saw it, we remembered what a student had told us in the circle: the hawk is the messenger. On the meeting ground of literature and personal experience, we find our themes. We examine issues of identity, justice, voice, tolerance. We educate ourselves about these issues and in the process try to figure out who we are. We give voice to our identities through writing and drama for our individual selves and our community of selves. We discover where we stand. Out of this awareness comes the commitment to performance. We develop a need to tell others where we stand. Without that witness, we can’t know what we learned in the same way. We are always working toward a presentation of some sort, but performance is not a goal in itself, nor is there any script beyond a general plan. As teachers, we set this plan in motion, then join in going where the whole group’s interests lead; we cannot know this in advance. Above all, we value the process itself, which has an organic, grass-roots quality. When each individual has arrived at a new level of insight, and the group reaches a new level of safety and trust, performances can occur. On the way to this collective willingness, plans are very fluid. We do a lot of checking with the group, presenting and changing ideas, before we know how the performance will take shape. Throughout the semester, the question that kept coming up was: “What do we do with all our information?” This led to the decision to create a dramatic interpretation of Columbus Day from the Native American point of view. Students formed small groups and selected the things they found most meaningful from the term. The final presentation included poetry, questions and answers, storytelling, group recitation, and drumming. Two students created a large backdrop, with a red bird symbol on a turquoise ground. We invited forty-five members of the school community to experience the performance. Like Mrs. Stone, they were moved; they went away with strong impressions and new information. Our students felt pride, power, self-respect, solidarity... and a sense of closure. After three months, we were ready to move on. The outcomes we seek are essential life skills. In writing, we aim for both improved formal skills and greater commitment to personal writing as a tool for learning and living (in high school, in college, in the world). We seek to develop skills for independent work--knowing how to make choices about what to learn and how to learn--as well as cooperative work--practicing group membership skills, appreciating diversity, and making a commitment to interdependence. We seek to promote confidence, the kind that comes from self-knowledge and successful risk-taking, as well as the humility that arises from genuine respect for other people. Finally, we aim to develop skills for communication in the broadest sense, of crafting and conveying an important message in public--literally putting yourself on the line for what you believe. We know we have succeeded in reaching these goals when everyone takes responsibility for planning and for process, and everyone does the same amount of work. (We as teachers do different things than students, but not more, not less.) We know it’s a success when people work independently and pull through for the group, when there are no “stars,” when no one dominates, and no one carries others. We know it’s working when students appreciate and support people they wouldn’t otherwise associate with...when they root for each other...when they report pride in the work and the group. We know it’s working when it feels like fun. Finally, we know we’ve succeeded when other people --our audience/witnesses--show us that they have been moved, provoked to think and ask questions, changed. One year, in a class with fifteen young women, our themes were identity and voice. We began reading short stories--by Zora Neale Hurston, Hisaye Yamamoto, Tillie Olsen, Toni Morrison, Grace Paley, and Alice Walker--and wrote personal observations, stories, and poems of our own while practicing improvisation to interpret them. For the final presentation, one student wrote a poem about her earlier life in South Africa and her love of the ocean, while other members of the class used long pieces of colored silk to represent water. Two others, one a Russian exchange student, presented a vignette based on a Grace Paley story about her mother, alternating narration in English and Russian. The entire group made plaster-of-paris masks, and wore them at the beginning of the performance to symbolize their sameness. By the end, the masks hung on a black backdrop, and each young woman had donned her own belt, hat, scarf, and other representations of individual identity. The audience of friends, teachers, and family members saw these young women take risks and find new voices, expressing commitments and dreams unheard before. In another class, we had class of twelve young men who were all athletes. We chose to explore the theme of competition. We started by reading August Wilson’s play Fences, and selections from Best American Short Stories. We invited the varsity baseball coach to join us for regular discussions, and we researched sports biographies while seeking a collective definition of a hero. At a Veterans’ Day assembly on the theme of American Heroes, each student spoke about an athlete who had broken barriers as well as records--people such as Jackie Robinson, and Jesse Owens. The assembly audience, three hundred students, teachers, and community guests, had expected a more traditionally patriotic observance of Veterans’ Day--until these students, the school’s own sports stars, spoke about the heroism of standing up for social justice. This year, we got around to reading Maya Angelou three months later than our original teaching plan had indicated. That set us on another path toward personal and collective insight, culminating in a public witness of the values that emerged. In January, the class presented a program to honor Martin Luther King, Jr., reading his words as a chorus sang “Lift Every Voice.” The singers included class members and many others they recruited, both students and teachers, who had never before performed at a school assembly. The performance had a significance beyond this, however. The James Weldon Johnson anthem, so central to African-American heritage and so standard in celebrations elsewhere in the country, had never before been performed at our school--which, at 178 years, is the oldest secondary school in Vermont. Vermont itself, with 98% Caucasian population, is the least racially and ethnically diverse state in the nation. Singing the anthem was a way to honor a history too readily ignored, too easily rendered silent and invisible, in northern New England. In lifting their voices against that silence, our students claimed connection with the struggle for civil rights and racial justice, a history that had become alive and immediate for them in our collective study. In this sense, although public performance brings closure to a topic for our group and we move on to another cycle of reading, writing, acting, and creating, the most important elements of the process continue beyond the presentation. We know we’ve made a difference when people who’ve seen the performance approach us to tell their stories about justice and identity and tolerance--when they too raise their voices about the issues we’ve brought forward. Our work goes on, then, in a larger community than our classroom if the small community we create is knowledgeable enough, strong enough, and brave enough. We know that this doesn’t ever happen exactly the same way; sometimes it happens only partially, and at other times its power is breathtaking. As one student wrote after the women’s identity piece: “We are all here to enact something which transforms us.” Our most recent experience has demonstrated that this transformative capacity is reaching a new level. In the spring, students in one of our courses chose respect as a theme. After writing personal definitions, they began seeking ways to raise awareness in the school and community, aiming for higher standards of respect in relation to a range of issues. (Although our area has a high degree of racial/ethnic homogeneity, there are stark differences in socio-economic status; the conflicts arising from social-class prejudice here are deep and debilitating. Rural young people, like those elsewhere in the nation, are subject to a panoply of risks--the seductive violence of popular media, substance abuse, fragmentation of families, homophobia, and domestic violence--that threaten both self-respect and the capacity to respect others.) As the newly -formed Student Action Coalition for Respect, students published their personal definitions in the daily school bulletin, passed out “respect ribbons” in school colors, designed posters, and invited everyone to sign a huge banner with their slogan: “Open your heart--as well as your mind.” The culmination was a rally on the school’s front steps, with music, speeches, and arrival of the town highway crew to install a special sign declaring a “hate-free campus.” While teachers and parents enthusiastically supported these actions, the students staked their claim to independent leadership with pride and confidence, handling every aspect from initial planning to press interviews to follow-up evaluation. When two hundred people attended the rally, wore ribbons, and talked daily about the meaning of respect, it seemed that positive activism had become “cool.” As teachers committed to social justice, we have aimed to build our students’ capacity for active contribution to a larger community of decency, strength, and health. We have come to see this capacity as central: not incidental to the business of developing academic skills, but integral to the school’s mission of developing life skills. We have come to feel that our students’ survival in the broadest sense--as individuals, as local and national citizens, and as members of the community of life--depends on these critical life skills. One student member of the Respect Coalition likes to quote environmental activist David Orr: “Knowledge carries with it the responsibility to see that it is well used in the world.” Another put it this way: “We knew we couldn't fix the nation in the month before school ended, so we thought we’d start at home with Thetford Academy.”