Principled practice for drama and theater arts with multilingual learners

Abstract

All disciplines have particular ways of knowing, common practices, and means of using language that mediate and potentially support engagement with the discipline. For multilingual learners, language demands of a discipline can be a closed door or a facilitated entryway. Drama and theater arts, the focus of our article, are often marginalized in curricula across the grades and therefore receive less attention to relevant disciplinary activities and language demands. In response to this pattern, our paper has several aims. We highlight ways language demands are embedded in drama and theater arts curricula and activities. Second, we describe and analyze ways instruction can attend to these demands and support multilingual learners’ engagements with them. Third, we distill a set of principles that can guide teachers, guest artists, and teacher educators in their work on drama and theater arts with multilingual student populations. To accomplish these aims, we draw upon our own and others’ teaching and research to frame instructional practices that support multilingual students’ engagements with drama and theater activities. Engagements we describe span early childhood through high school years. Tapping our own work in several US states (Illinois, North Carolina, California), as well as in Argentina and the UK, we present data and themes from a high school study featuring drama and theater arts practices used with multilingual learners. We examine how principles from our framework are illustrated in data of the study. We also identify challenges and critical adaptations that may be needed to realize the potential of drama in work with multilingual students. Principles we identify may aid teachers, guest artists, and teacher educators in shaping drama and theater arts activities that spotlight language demands of the discipline(s) of drama and theater and provide supportive and meaningful instruction.

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