ERIC Number: EJ1189642
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2018
Pages: 11
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0034-0561
EISSN: N/A
Assembling Improv and Collaborative Story Building in Language Arts Class
Lenters, Kimberly; Smith, Cameron
Reading Teacher, v72 n2 p179-189 Sep-Oct 2018
In this article, the authors present a literacy research project in which humor, popular culture, and improvisational comedy (improv) are viewed as curricular resources to engage students' minds "and" bodies in multimodal story building, following a posthuman assemblage theory approach to literacy learning. This approach takes students' learning beyond the skills of the six language arts strands to consider how affect, gesture, space, time, and improvisation work together in story writing. The authors invited improv artist Ben Cannon to work in collaboration with two fifth-grade classroom teachers, their 50 students, and the research team to develop a children's comedy composing workshop. Over the course of two weeks, half-day workshops employed improv techniques and related activities for composing comedic characters and collaborative comedic stories. In this article, the authors share some of the activities and what they learned about students' oral and written story-building processes.
Descriptors: Language Arts, Cooperative Learning, Story Telling, Creative Activities, Humor, Popular Culture, Multimedia Instruction, Literacy, Elementary School Teachers, Elementary School Students, Grade 5, Workshops, Oral Language, Writing (Composition)
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: Elementary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A