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Integrated Arts Approaches in Education: Dramatic Arts as a Mediator for Literacy
Learning
Alida Anderson
American University, Washington, DC
Linda Krakaur
George Mason University, Arlington, Virginia
Address for correspondence:
Dr. Alida Anderson
School of Education, Teaching and Health
4400 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC 20016
Tel.: (202) 885-6214
Fax: (202) 885-1187
Email: [email protected]
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Abstract
This paper provides integrated arts resources for working with students in the areas of
dramatic arts and literacy learning. First, theoretical background on integrated arts
approaches in drama and literacy skill learning will be presented. The next section is a
review of the literature on methods and materials to support integrated dramatic arts
practices with literacy skills learning. Finally, perspectives on facilitating access,
participation and progress in dramatic arts-based activities as well as barriers to such
implementation will be explored.
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Introduction
Current research on integrated arts approaches (IAA) with young children focuses
on theory and rationale for its use (Cornett, 2007; Palsha, 2001; Research Triangle
Group, 1998). Arts integration is generally defined as the linking of a content area and
an art form; for the purposes of reaching a deeper level of engagement, learning, and
reflection than without the art form. In an integrated classroom, students are working
“with” the art form and “through” the art form to reach academic, social, and personal
goals (Cornett, 2007, p. 13). The use of multiple and diverse materials and methods to
teach concepts and skills precipitates reaching and teaching each and every ‘whole
child’ (McGregor, Tate, & Robinson, 1977, p. 16). Additionally, researchers and
practitioners of IAA with school age students identify the need to assess the impact arts
experiences on students’ developmental and achievement skills (Mason, Steedly, &
Thormann, 2008). Thus, the purpose of this paper is to review information for working
with students with diverse needs (developmental and linguistic) in dramatic arts settings
to foster literacy learning, and to identify next steps for research and practice.
Drama in Education
Drama in education has been recognized as a dynamic methodology for teaching
throughout the world, particularly in Canada, England, Ireland, and Australia. Fisher and
Williams (2000, p. vii) state that “learning to be literate begins with speaking and
listening; speech enables us to describe the world while written speech has a separate
linguistic function – to sustain and order our thinking.” Yet, many students struggle with
these sophisticated developmental processes and require an explicit, engaging, and
holistic approach to learning. Drama in education is the use of drama conventions to
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reach educational objectives, brings students into an “as if” world where actions and
consequences matter (Heathcote, 1995).
Students are provided multiple opportunities to explore, shape, and communicate
their understandings using dramatic elements including: voice, body, and imagination.
Margaret Meek (as cited in Wilhelm, 2002, p. 10) states that “drama strategies make
public the secret things that expert readers know and do so that these usually invisible
strategies will be made physical, external, and concrete.” Process drama is the
exploration of a pre-text (story, current event, poem, picture, etc.) through carefully
crafted dramatic episodes, providing a rich context for students to experience, shape
and reflect on their ideas (O’Neill, 1995). Process drama deepens engagement and
ultimately understanding through fictional episodes where “time” is slowed down and
tension increased. As the focus intensifies, students manifest a variety of roles and
attitudes that allow them to understand and make critical inferences and deductions.
Students have an ongoing opportunity to execute and refine critical literacy skills
(comprehension and production of complex thoughts and ideas) through process drama
(Fisher & Williams, 2000).
Rationale for Connecting Drama and Literacy Skill Learning
For students with disabilities, literacy skill learning (oral and written
comprehension and expression) is an area of considerable need. Students with diverse
learning needs may struggle with understanding and/or producing language, which
impacts their ability to use written language (receptively or expressively). Students from
under resourced environments typically have compromised or limited access to literacy
learning. Students with diverse language backgrounds have confounds with literacy skill
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learning if they do not receive adequate instruction in both their native language
concomitant with English learning. For all of these students, who we refer to as those
with “diverse learning needs”, literacy learning challenges are many. Without
individualized support and attention, these challenges tend to result in students’ lack of
interest in, or motivation for learning.
One way to address this dilemma is through the use of learning activities that
foster engagement through real life experience. Elliot Eisner (2000) proposes that
educational culture shift to one that has a greater focus on becoming than on being by:
(1) placing more value on the imaginative than on the factual; (2) assigning greater
priority to valuing than to measuring; and (3) regarding the quality of the journey as
more educationally significant than the speed at which the destination is reached.
Instruction must be interesting, student centered, and targeted to students’ language
and literacy development to create a rich, social and healthy psychological setting that
fosters positive attitudes about learning (Bear & Barone, 1998). Often referred to as
authentic learning, this approach has been shown to keep students with such
challenges engaged in the process of learning (Eisner, 1998). For example, Gallas
(2003, p. 20) explains that “to read a text with understanding and insight, we must move
inside the text, pulling our life along with us and incorporating the text and our lives into
a new understanding.”
Development of cognition and language. Drama is the mediator between
language and cognition as it enhances higher level thinking skills and is based on
representing experience in symbolic form by requiring participants to look for patterns
and relationships in events (McGregor et al., 1977). Thinking routines for understanding
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drama are similar to those for reading comprehension. Sun (2003) notes that in both
circumstances, students are decoding symbols; they shape ideas based on purpose
and audience, finding meaning, and constructing language. Students also retain and
internalize new understandings through drama as the representations of ideas and
feelings are constructed through the use of the ‘whole body’. It is important to note that
students engaged in drama reconstruct prior knowledge schemas to form increasingly
sophisticated and complex understandings of ideas and events. Students also
experiment with multiple forms of literacy (listening, speaking, reading, writing) while
developing a variety of registers and levels of language according to the demands of the
dramatic context.
Language, Cognition, and Social Development Theories
Theoretical background and rationale of using dramatic arts approaches for
teaching literacy skills to students with diverse needs is based on language, cognition,
and social/emotional development theories. Cognitive and linguistic theories of
development establish the significance of linguistic specificity and its contribution to
children’s development of cognitive and social communication skills. These
perspectives include children’s activities in symbolic representation, assimilation and
accommodation, schema formation, and social participation, all of which influence their
linguistic, cognitive, and social skill development, and their development of literate
language, or linguistic specificity.
Piagetian theory. A Piagetian perspective on children’s cognitive and linguistic
skill development emphasizes the role of mental representation. Children’s shift from
symbolic to ideational forms of representation through language use is closely
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associated with their increasingly specific and “literate” use of language. In Piaget’s
(1926, 1963) preoperational, symbolic, and formal operations stages, children use
increasingly sophisticated and complex language features to represent symbolic and
abstract ideas. Pellegrini (1985) uses Piagetian theory to describe how children
transition from symbolic to ideational stages of representational thought, in which they
increasingly rely on specific language features (i.e., “literate language”) in their
conversations in play contexts. According to Pellegrini, children’s literate language use
reflects their increased mental representation of events and objects. Children in a
preoperational stage of development use symbols or objects to represent reality (e.g., a
child might pretend a doll is a baby); as children progress from preoperational into more
advanced symbolic stages of development, their object representations become
ideational (e.g., the child pretends to be a baby), and they use literate language features
such as mental and linguistic verbs, temporal and causal conjunctions, and elaborated
noun-phrases to convey their ideas in symbolic play. The integration of mental with
linguistic representations offers theoretical basis for the use of dramatic arts activities to
teach literacy skills as drama “purposefully involves children in the enactment of their
imaginings” (Shaw as cited in Day & Norman, 1983, p. 30).
According to Piagetian theory, children’s linguistic specificity also helps them
assimilate and accommodate information from the environment. As children acquire
and integrate information to form increasingly sophisticated mental representations,
they rely on increasingly specific and complex language features. Researchers
examining children’s language use in play contexts have found that children use higher
rates of specific language features in ideational, symbolic play as contrasted with
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constructive or solitary object play (Culatta, 1994; Pellegrini, Galda, Bartini, & Charak,
1998). Van Oers (1998) suggests that children’s linguistic specificity might be linked to
their development of meaningful abstract thinking or the ability to recontextualize
previously experienced events, since they can describe temporal and sequential
information through features such as conjunctive phrases.
Schema theory. Schema theory informs the current discussion of linguistic
specificity and representational forms, with respect to children’s development of
linguistic and cognitive structures. Schemata are the underlying cognitive and linguistic
structures that children develop as they progress from concrete operational thought to
formal operational thought. For instance, during concrete operational stages of schema
development, children use labels and references, and their utterances contain simple
noun- and verb-phrases. As children progress to the formal operational stages of causal
reasoning, their utterances become more specific and include linguistic features such
as conjunctive phrases and as well as elaborated noun- and verb-phrases. In this way,
dramatic arts activities provide a scaffold between mental and linguistic representations.
According to a schematic perspective of linguistic development, children develop skills
through the use of increasingly specific and elaborated features in social and linguistic
interactions, adjusting their existing mental schema to meet the demands of their
environment. This process occurs in dramatic experiences as students use particular
actions and objects to create a fictional world. Bolton (1979, p. 59) notes, “there cannot
be an action without a subjective meaning, that is, some relationship between the action
and the child doing it.”
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Script theory. Script theory, a variation of schema theory informs children’s
development of linguistic specificity and is relevant to dramatic arts. Script theorists
suggest that children’s mental schemata are, in fact, a repertoire of linguistic scripts
with particular features (Schank & Abelson, 1977). As children experience events, they
develop increasingly specific and complex linguistic structures, and in turn, increasingly
complex and elaborated scripts.
Vygotskian Theory
Children experience and use increasingly specific and complex language
features through their symbolic interactions. Vygotsky (1978) states that children
develop in linguistic, cognitive, and social domains through their interaction with their
environment. Children’s optimal learning environment, known as their zone of proximal
development (ZPD) is characterized by the input they receive as being at or above their
own ability level. Pellegrini’s (1985) model is an application of Vygotskian social
interaction theory in explaining how children come to use specific language to meet the
demands of their environment. Pellegrini characterizes children’s specific language use
as their linguistic resolution between two opposing forces of “wish fulfillment (e.g.,
fantasy) and rule-government” in meeting the conventional demands of the environment
(Pellegrini, 1985, p. 82; Pellegrini & Galda, 1998, p. 69). Pellegrini contends that
symbolic dramatic play contexts are in the child’s ZPD for language, social, and
cognitive development, since they allow the child to function in this “wish fulfillment”
stage. Pellegrini’s evidence is based on the finding that preschool age children
understand and use linguistically specific features such as noun phrases, conjunctive
clauses, adverbs, and mental and linguistic verbs most reliably in symbolic play
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contexts with peers. Thus, children’s specific language use supports their symbolic
interactions and is linked to concrete objects in the environment, as well as to more
abstract and socially mediated symbols.
Social-cognitive perspective informs specific language use in dramatic arts
contexts for children with and without disabilities. This perspective draws on Vygotskian
theory to illustrate how children’s language use is related to their development of social
skills (Rubin, Fein, & Vandenberg, 1983; Smilansky, 1968). The Smilansky-Parten
Matrix illustrates the relationship between children’s development of social and
language skills. Rubin and colleagues’ (1983) apply Smilansky’s (1968) play contexts
(e.g., functional/preoperational, constructive, dramatic/symbolic) and Parten’s (1932)
continuum of social participation (i.e., solitary, parallel, and interactive) to characterize
relationships among linguistic, social, and play factors in early childhood. Pellegrini
(1985), and Pellegrini and Galda (1998, p. 60) apply Rubin et al.’s (1983) model to
explain the relationship between specific language use and various play contexts, in
which language use in the play context of dramatic/symbolic play is most highly
associated with the interactive type of social participation, as compared to parallel or
solitary types of social participation, which are not associated with specific language
use.
Review of Methods and Materials
Language-Based Intervention Methods for Studying Linguistic Specificity
Researchers have assessed children’s linguistic specificity through oral literate
language, which comprises elaborated noun phrases, mental and linguistic verbs,
conjunctions, and adverbs (Anderson, 2010; Justice & Kaderavek, 2004; Westby, 1985;
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1994). These authors demonstrate that literate language is a measurable aspect of
preschool age children’s language production. Also, differences in production of literate
language have been found among preschool and school-age populations with and
without disabilities (Anderson, 2010; Greenhalgh, 1999; Greenhalgh & Strong, 2001).
An important aspect of literate language use is that it is related to children’s first
experiences with relaying information in contexts such as story and event retelling. This
has relevance when considering how dramatic arts activities mediate language
production in children.
Play contexts. Pellegrini (1985) uses specific literate language features as the
outcome measure to assess linguistic specificity in preschoolers’ dyadic conversations.
Pellegrini categorizes play contexts based on the structure and function of language
used by participants; this matrix of play categories serves as a set of predictor variables
for frequency of literate language use, on dimensions of (a) conjunctions (temporal and
causal); (b) noun phrases; (c) reference (endophora and exophora); and (d) verbs. In
this study, Pellegrini reports consistently high correlations (.62 to .93) between play
categories of symbolic play and literate language use among preschool dyads. Other
descriptive findings support the preliminary research on literate language in dramatic
and symbolic play contexts. Sachs, Goldman, and Chaille (1985) report that preschool
age children engaged in dyadic play with a set of pretend doctor toys produce higher
rates of specific vocabulary (medical terms and functions) as compared to non-thematic
play, such as construction or block-building.
Language Intervention Research
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Language intervention research with children having language and
developmental disabilities typically involves targeting functional language goals in
conversational play contexts (Nathan, 2002; Raab & Carl, 2004; Smith et al., 2004;
Warren & Yoder, 2004). Intervention studies involve children’s specific language feature
use during play contexts in home- and clinic-based settings. Findings indicate that
factors such as facilitation technique (i.e., direct or indirect), interaction partner (parent
or clinician), and setting (e.g., clinic, home, or preschool) are important considerations
to the efficacy of language interventions with young children (e.g., Smith et al., 2004).
Dramatic play and linguistic specificity. McKeough (1984) examines the effects of
sociodramatic play on linguistic specificity of children with disabilities in dramatic play.
McKeough reports significant correlations between dramatic play enactments and
children’s use of linguistically specific features with groups of children, ranging in age
from 4 to 10 years old. The findings indicate that the combination of dramatic play and
narrative retelling consistently results in higher rates of literate language use
(conjunction and mental-linguistic verbs) across both language ability and age groups of
children than either context by itself.
Drama and social communication. Other research aimed at social communication
involved data collection via observations, interviews, and collaboratively created and
performed artwork with middle and high school age students with autism spectrum
disorder (ASD) (Schieman & Nichols, 2010). The methodology was “a/r/tographic”, in
which the authors acted as artists, researchers, and teachers throughout the study
(Leavy, 2008). Participants in the week-long drama program included 29 adolescent
campers who with ASD and 18 adolescent camp counselors. The authors reported
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robust gains in participants’ social communication understanding and concept
development. A similar effect of drama was observed in gains of elementary age
students with learning disabilities engaged in a creative drama program, which led to
increased social and oral expressive language skills (de la Cruz, 1995).
Drama and literacy skills and attitudes. Krakaur (2005) conducted a mixed
method study of process drama to teach literacy skills to seventh grade students with
disabilities. Reading attitude surveys, interviews, and observation data were collected
to identify changes in reading comprehension, written language, and motivation among
students. Process drama was implemented as a central instructional device for a three
month literature unit in which the study occurred. Using Heathcote’s (as cited in
Wagner, 1999) “mantle of the expert” approach, students were placed in roles as
documentarians to create a film. As students moved in and out of the dramatic world,
they engaged in multiple forms of literacy (listening, speaking, reading, and writing).
Students increased in their self-reported attitudes toward literacy, as well as in their
performance on standardized reading and criterion-based written language
assessments.
Review of the Literature on Drama in Education
Catterall’s review of the research on drama in education reveals important
aspects about the state of what is known about its effects in education. The criterion for
studies to be included in the review was that individuals adopted roles (i.e., characters
other than themselves), with drama broadly defined by the unifying characteristic of the
adoption of character roles by learners. The studies involved portraying a character
from children’s literature; other roles emerged from fantasy and pretend play with adult
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prompting. Most research had groups of children enacting scenarios or completing
stories, with and without advance planning, concentrating on early childhood and
elementary age populations. Drama was found to influence literacy outcomes focused
on narrative understanding and comprehension (e.g., Dupont, 1992; Pellegrini & Galda,
1982; Page, 1983; Parks & Rose, 1997; Williamson & Silvern, 1992). Other studies
found effects of “thought organizing’ drama, narrative, and fantasy play activities on
written expression (Moore & Caldwell, 1993; Pellegrini, 1980; Wagner, 1986).
Barriers and Facilitators
Barriers
Barriers to using dramatic arts to teach literacy skills include the primary focus on
rudimentary tasks, rather than complex and deeply engaging ideas. This issue is
precipitated by the focus on teaching and reaching standardized benchmarks, which
prevents much of the engagement through IAA from occurring (Gulatt, 2008). As
several studies note, IAA’s role in school curriculum increases student achievement
(e.g., Deasy, 2002; Eisner, 1998; Reardon, 2005). Based on a study of a large-scale
project in Minneapolis, researchers concluded “the amount of arts integration matters.”
More than mere exposure to the arts is necessary to affect substantial gains in learning
(Cornett, 2007, p. 10).
Another barrier is in the lack of preservice teacher education and professional
development for IAA such as drama. Drama is generally viewed as a performance art
rather than a process to engage students and scaffold literacy development. Similarly,
training and support for inservice teachers and staff at schools is another barrier to
implementation of IAA. Since drama in education shifts traditional teacher and student
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dynamics, teachers must be able to reflect and process these shifts (McGregor et al.,
1977). For example, children, either on their own or with the teacher, are encouraged to
find, select, and create their own material, a radical shift from conventional teachercontrolled materials selection.
Facilitators
A key facilitator to implementing IAA is in the development of teacher knowledge
and skill (Cornett, 2007, p. 223). This type of professional development effort should
span the art forms, their integration within content areas (e.g., literacy), and the types of
differentiation, accommodations, and modifications necessary to meet individuals’
unique learning needs, to include students with diverse learning needs. Teachers must
feel comfortable gradually developing arts literacy and pedagogy, allowing for their
personal and attitudinal investment in IAA with students having a wide range of needs
and abilities (Cornett, 2007). In conjunction with professional development aimed at
integrated arts literacy and pedagogy, another key facilitator is in the existence of a
unifying and collaborative effort, particularly with inclusion of students with disabilities in
IAA school wide.
An insight from the field of special education is in the role of universal design for
learning (UDL) as a facilitator to successful inclusion in IAA. Conceivably, UDL ensures
opportunities for students of diverse abilities to access, participate, progress in dramatic
arts activities focused on literacy learning. The principles of UDL can guide our thinking
about facilitators in the use of multiple means of: (1) representation to give learners
various ways of acquiring information and knowledge; (2) expression to provide learners
alternatives for demonstrating what they know; and (3) engagement to tap into learners'
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interests, offer appropriate challenges, and increase motivation (Center for Applied
Special Technologies, 2010).
Eisner (2000) maintains that “the limits of language do not determine the limits of
our thinking.” Students with diverse learning needs deserve unlimited approaches to
facilitate expression of their ideas. The mediation of specific literate language through
representational forms such as drama provides access and the opportunity for these
students to participate and progress in literacy skill learning. Drama is well-positioned to
play a pivotal role in teaching and learning as educators aim to foster students’
processing of thought and language in as full, complex, and sensitive ways as possible,
with the goal of conveying information through spoken and written word (i.e., literacy
skills). This statement reflects an individual’s entire experience and at the same time
orders it and relates it to other knowledge, which is a goal worthy of any educational
endeavor (Wagner, 1999).
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