Everyone is reading! A participatory theater project to promote reading competence and social interaction in inclusive learning settings
Submitted by:
Winnie-Karen Giera
Abstract:
Reading literacy is "the ability to understand, use, evaluate, reflect on, and engage with texts in order to achieve one's own goals, develop one's own knowledge and potential, and participate actively in society" (OECD, 2019: 38). Many students do not yet have secure reading skills by the age of 15 (ibid). For example, nearly one-third of adolescents in non-gymnasium schools lack the ability to compose and reflect on the meaning of texts, specially in non-high school settings. Yet, various models of reading literacy show how important this skill is in turn, as a lack of literacy skills leads to barriers in educational progression (Stanat et al., 2010). A theatre play, on the other hand, enables the activation and thus participation of all due to the high action orientation through scenic play and the openness to results in the staging. According to Rosebrock & Nix` reading model (2015), playful engagement with a play leads to local and global coherence at the process level, participation at the subject level, and peer interaction at the social level. That led us to our research question in two schools: How can a theater project promote reading and social interaction? We handle in terms of the RTI approach to identify reading levels and compare them prior and after theater intervention (LGVT 5-12; SLS 2-9). Added questionnaires to measure the self-efficacy (Jerusalem & Schwarzer, 1999), and social interaction, show in the qualitative and quantitative data improvements in social interaction, and reading competence. This design-based research study (Philippakos et al., 2021) in several cycles i) explains how the theater project is implemented and modified in schools in the three cycles, ii) and shows and discusses the results of this project in the first three cycles.
Literature
Berkeley, S., Bender, W. N., Gregg Peaster, L., & Saunders, L. (2009). Implementation of Response to Intervention: A Snapshot of Progress. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 42(1), 85–95. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022219408326214.
Boal, A. (2019). Theatre of the Oppressed. London: Pluto Press.
OECD (2019). PISA 2018 Results (Volume I): What Students Know and Can Do, PISA, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/5f07c754-en.
Philippakos, Z.A., Howell, E. & Pellegrino, A. (2021). Design-Based Research. Theory and Application. New York: Guilford.