Discusses the author's experience as a playwright and teacher of public readings of early drafts of new plays. Explains the Five Step Model for these readings as follows: prepare the playwright before the reading; prepare the audience with a precurtain speech; after the reading, establish discussion ground rules; remember these guidelines during…

Presents a lesson that might be useful early on teaching a play writing class. Considers how audiences care about things that a character cares about. Explains that in a story the higher the stakes are for the character, the more an audience will invest in the story. Presents a seven question quiz with answers including a discussion of each…

Aims to help teachers find a way to help students enjoy Shakespeare through the process of performance. Provides guidelines gained from personal experience for teachers presenting the plays with secondary students that include the following: (1) audience consideration, (2) actor-ownership of the performance, (3) staging limitations, and (4)…

Argues that, to break out of the empty rhetoric characteristic of most student writing, students and teachers must break the parent-child rhetorical pattern, in which parents and teachers assume the role of nonlisteners. (JAD)

Illustrates the power of responsive teaching and how one teacher used a modern poem about cruelty to address a recent incident of her own students' cruelty to a classmate. Notes that the class responded with compassion, tolerance, and a sense of caring for those who are different. (MG)

Explores how teachers can help their students look for meaning in the visual media. Presents the theory that students object to looking for meaning in certain forms of visual media, because they dislike having their world complicated with unnecessary interpretive searching. Discusses the results of several class exercises adapted from David…

This paper offers some guidelines, to be shared with students, that can help make the evaluation of creative responses and projects affirmative, honest, and heartfelt. What should teachers look for in a creative project? The project should move the audience in some deeply personal way, contain some element of surprise, and fulfill the spirit--if…

Argues that the construction of a performance script permits the modification of the original text in order to render that original theatrically communicative in the present. Notes that the dominant concerns of script modification are in how to negotiate audience expectations. Describes three types of textual deviation: nonverbal alteration;…

Argues that social studies teachers should help improve effective speaking through promoting students' awareness of audience throughout the school year. Presents class activities to promote growth in this skill. (SR)

Elementary and middle school teachers can employ storytelling techniques using selections such as episodes from children's novels to encourage even the most reluctant readers. The telling of complete episodes from novels causes reluctant readers to identify with a character and brings them into the plot. The Storytelling Episode Model (SEM) is a…

Describes an extension of dialog journals, audience journals. States that, with the advent of e-mail, English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) students can send their journals to an "E-partner," and they can also make meaning by summarizing their E-partners' journal entries which are sent to both E-partner and instructor. Suggests that this…

An undergraduate course at the University of South Florida called "Relationships on Film" treats movies as relationship texts to be "read" by active viewers. Through the semester, students engage film in two ways. First, they interpret films as response papers. Each week, students watch the assigned film outside of class. Then…

This adaptation of the "Three Little Pigs" story is suitable for performance in elementary grades, especially around Halloween. The story comes with step-by-step directions for how to dramatize the action for maximum audience participation and response and with suggestions for optional learning activities that can be used with the story.…

A course was designed around three major questions: (1) what is the relationship between rhetoric and its context; (2) how does the message construct a particular reality for the audience and the rhetor; and (3) what does the rhetorical artifact suggest about the rhetor? Feminist criticism is used as one of the three methods that focus on the…

Part of a larger project to design a production curriculum and measure the impact of this production activity on children's writing, visual thinking, and problem solving skills, a project developed an effective but inexpensive video for use in teaching animation processes to students at the elementary school level. The project used "cutout" or…