Chapter 14: Literacy, Connection, and Leadership: Experiential Theater in the ELA Classroom

In the fall of 2019, I was looking forward to my fifth year teaching a whole class novel, The Watsons Go to Birmingham-1963 by Christopher Paul Curtis. Although students ultimately loved it, there were those who struggled to find an entry point, and I wanted to bring all of us through the book’s threshold at once, so we could more synchronously engage in the learning activities for the duration of the novel study. I looked for a new path to take, and arts integration led the way.

A workshop for the ARTeacher Fellowship led by Christopher Parks of Experiential Theater Company (NJ) sparked two guiding questions for me: How might experiential theater provide an entry point for my reluctant and low-level readers? What could the creation and performance of experiential theater scripts bring to my classroom at the start of a whole class novel study?