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Voices in Urban Education
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Extending Learning
VUE Number 16, Summer 2007
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
EXCERPT:
Across the Doorsill: Extending Learning with Students in Mind and Body
By Eileen Landay
Eileen Landay is clinical professor of English education (ret.) at Brown University and faculty director of the ArtsLiteracy Project.
> Author's biography
A program designed to develop literacy in and through the arts creates a “third space” between students’ lives in school and their lives outside of school.
Awake
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.
—Rumi
The fall term started at Central High School in St. Paul, Minnesota, two days after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans on August 29, 2005. When students arrived in Jan Mandell’s advanced theater class, a discussion began about what was happening several thousand miles to the south. A big storm. Flooding. People on rooftops and crowded into a big building. It was all over the TV. Actually, students conceded, they didn’t really know much.
Mandell herself wanted to know more. She wanted her students to know more and believed that, together, the class could come to understand many aspects of the disaster and perhaps even find ways to help. In Mandell’s classes, students do much more than put on plays; they create, refine, and perform original plays based on topics and themes she and the class identify as being important to them as individuals and, also, to the larger society. After some discussion, the class decided it would create a theater piece about New Orleans and Katrina.
In a recent conversation, Mandell explained: “I asked them, ‘Do you want to go any deeper with this? Find a newspaper article or television report about Katrina that you can connect with personally. Where can you find yourself out there?’ They brought in a variety of things. Some people watched TV and wrote about it. Others came in with pictures and articles from the newspaper.”
In this way, the class set about learning about Hurricane Katrina. They shared the information they had. Next, they talked about what they would need to know in order to create an accurate and interesting performance. They brainstormed a list and gave themselves assignments: to watch, listen, and read the news to get a full and accurate picture of what was happening; to learn about the geography, history, and customs of New Orleans; to understand as much as they could about the hurricane; and to gather stories of people affected by the storm.
They did all these things and more. Some collected clothing and worked as volunteers at the local Martin Luther King Center, sorting and packing donated clothing bound for Louisiana. By chance, there they met a family who had survived the hurricane and come north to establish residence in St. Paul. Through ongoing interviews, this couple gave the students a personal account of exactly what they had experienced. Other students located local people with firsthand knowledge of life and customs in New Orleans — the school’s principal among them — and invited them to come to class. Over the next few weeks, the students listened, viewed, read, researched, discussed, debated, improvised, and wrote vignettes and narratives describing what they had learned.With the help of their teacher and volunteer actors and directors, they wove their work into a performance they titled simply Katrina.
Archives
Extending Learning
VUE Number 16, Summer 2007
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
EXCERPT:
Across the Doorsill: Extending Learning with Students in Mind and Body
By Eileen Landay
Eileen Landay is clinical professor of English education (ret.) at Brown University and faculty director of the ArtsLiteracy Project.
> Author's biography
A program designed to develop literacy in and through the arts creates a “third space” between students’ lives in school and their lives outside of school.
Awake
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.
—Rumi
The fall term started at Central High School in St. Paul, Minnesota, two days after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans on August 29, 2005. When students arrived in Jan Mandell’s advanced theater class, a discussion began about what was happening several thousand miles to the south. A big storm. Flooding. People on rooftops and crowded into a big building. It was all over the TV. Actually, students conceded, they didn’t really know much.
Mandell herself wanted to know more. She wanted her students to know more and believed that, together, the class could come to understand many aspects of the disaster and perhaps even find ways to help. In Mandell’s classes, students do much more than put on plays; they create, refine, and perform original plays based on topics and themes she and the class identify as being important to them as individuals and, also, to the larger society. After some discussion, the class decided it would create a theater piece about New Orleans and Katrina.
In a recent conversation, Mandell explained: “I asked them, ‘Do you want to go any deeper with this? Find a newspaper article or television report about Katrina that you can connect with personally. Where can you find yourself out there?’ They brought in a variety of things. Some people watched TV and wrote about it. Others came in with pictures and articles from the newspaper.”
In this way, the class set about learning about Hurricane Katrina. They shared the information they had. Next, they talked about what they would need to know in order to create an accurate and interesting performance. They brainstormed a list and gave themselves assignments: to watch, listen, and read the news to get a full and accurate picture of what was happening; to learn about the geography, history, and customs of New Orleans; to understand as much as they could about the hurricane; and to gather stories of people affected by the storm.
They did all these things and more. Some collected clothing and worked as volunteers at the local Martin Luther King Center, sorting and packing donated clothing bound for Louisiana. By chance, there they met a family who had survived the hurricane and come north to establish residence in St. Paul. Through ongoing interviews, this couple gave the students a personal account of exactly what they had experienced. Other students located local people with firsthand knowledge of life and customs in New Orleans — the school’s principal among them — and invited them to come to class. Over the next few weeks, the students listened, viewed, read, researched, discussed, debated, improvised, and wrote vignettes and narratives describing what they had learned.With the help of their teacher and volunteer actors and directors, they wove their work into a performance they titled simply Katrina.
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