Chapter 3: Transforming Young Children’s Engagement With Literat ure: Process Drama as Pedagogy

In this teacher inquiry, the author connects theory and practice involving young children’s responses to literature through process drama pedagogy. In a multiage class of 23 first-to-third graders, the author (with the support of the classroom teacher) reads aloud a picture book, repeatedly pausing so the children can actively participate in process drama forms that take them deeper into the fictionalized literary world of the story, and also into critical reflection on their beliefs, values, and feelings about possible real-world experiences. The interpretation of the audio-recorded documentation of this aesthetic experience reveals how the children’s affinity for play, integrated use of multiple modalities, and language from their own lived and imagined experiences, supports them in co-constructing meaning of the literary and drama texts. In a small, but transformative way, the children come to think in new ways about the constructed nature of text and about the kind of world in which they wish to live.