Communion and Culture in the Classroom

Several years ago, I began to wonder whether the theory of cultural learning could be applied to solve practical problems in American education. Is part of the problem of American schools the reliance on rote learning at the expense of shared psychological states between children and those instructing them? In the United States there is na achiement gap that begins before the child’s firs day of school. Children from low-income backrounds enter kindergarten with less than half the vocabulary of their affluent classmates, placing them at high risk for academic failure. Unfortunately, In schools with large populations of such children, kindegarten instruction often does not resemble childcentered early education, and didactic instruction alone does not suffice where the needed foundational competencies are not in place. In other words, it does not take advantage of the uniquely human forms of learing.

To address these student's need for enriched social and communicative experiences, cultural learning experiences, we introduced an intervention in which teaching artists asisted classroom teachers to infuse drama into the language-arts curriculum. From my own experience in theater I know that drama is inherently mimetic. It calls upon all participants, playrights, designer, actors, and audience, to identify with each other and share subjective experiences. In effect, it raises, Watch me while I do this! to an art form. I reasoned that for children to become enculturated in the ways of school, classrooom experiences that invite them to share psychologial states with others, especially with adults, are necessary. 

In our intervention, students, teachers, and artists collaboratively engaged inn the mimetic art of story, they created characters, communicated intentions, and made meaning wth each other. Sharing one another's lived experieces is essential t ceating even the simplest drama, and we hoped this might provide the shared engaements that would support the hildrens's adapttaiton to the culture of school. In one of our early studies, an older child said of the playwright-teacher, Nobody cares about little kids anymore, but Mr. P. listens to us.

Although the intervention was brief, only 13 lessons over two months, we hypothesized that the emotionally and linguistically rich experience of joint pretense would enhance the children's language development. We anticipated that if students were free to know their teachers and to be knw by them in this context to be in communicon their cultural learnning, in this case learning of linguage, would flourish. During our observation of one classroom visit by a teaching artist, we learned what the possibilities were for children's engagement and identification. As the artist approached, the students scurried about the classroom searching for the storybook they had used previously as the starting point for their drama. The book was not to be found, but the students kept insisting, We need the book! Where is the book? One little girl stepped forward t address her clasmates, rassring them with a gesture that suggested her entirebody was opening like a volume of stories, and sai, We don't need the book. We are the book. In this proclamtions mimesis and communion are found.

To test our hypothesis, we randomly assigned volunteering schools to intervention and waiting control conditions. Data were colleted each year on approximately 100 control and 100 intervention students, 94 percent African American, 71 percent clasified as low-income. Before and after the intervention, each year for three years, kindergarten students were individually given standardized assessments of language development and a creative writing task. School administrators provide student achievement data.

Kindergarten students in the drama intervention schools showed superior improvement in their writing, the size of the vocabulary they used, the number of sentences the theme, and the resolution of their stories all improved compared to controls. They also were significantly more likey to improved compared to controls. They also were significantly more likely to improve in their performance on tests of syntax development than were the students in the control schools. We followed the students as they entered first and second frande to measure any enduring effets of the 13 dramas lessons. Without the benefit of any further intervention the students who were in and superior language arts achievement test scores in first grade, and continued to have superior report-card grades in second grade. Students with special needs benefited even more. We have embarked on a four-year study to adpt this intervention t the needs of kindergarten students with limited Enghish proficiency, testing to see if we can enhance their performance in the Englhis-only schools they attend. We expect that the cultural learning process of shared story-making will support the language acquisition of these children to a greater degree that the standard instructional practices do.

Formal education in schools is designed for the transmission of culture. However, large national studies in the United States show that the home envirnment acconts for mos of the variance in student's achievemnt. Many low-income children enter school without the advantage of culcultural consistency between home and school. THe supportive processes we associate with first language aquisition, such as are found in the linguistic environment of he home, must be experienced in the classroom for them to succeed. Creating an environment in school that supports the child's powerful motivantion to sahre feelings and intentions wth ohers wil enhance the cultural learning opportunities these children need to become a part of the schol community. Communion and cultural learning are the natural process and product of rich human engagement, in the classrooom as elsewhere.

Mimesis and Sciennce Empirical Research on Imitation and the Mimetic Theory of Culture and Religion. Scott R. Garrels. pg.23.