Assembling Improv and Collaborative Story Building in Language Arts Class. (5th February 2018) - Lenters, Kimberly
Abstract: In this article, the authors present a literacy research project in which humor, popular culture, and improvisational comedy (improv) are viewed as curricular resources to engage students' minds and bodies in multimodal story building, following a posthuman assemblage theory approach to literacy learning. This approach takes students' learning beyond the skills of the six language arts strands to consider how affect, gesture, space, time, and improvisation work together in story writing. The authors invited improv artist Ben Cannon to work in collaboration with two fifth‐grade classroom teachers, their 50 students, and the research team to develop a children's comedy composing workshop. Over the course of two weeks, half‐day workshops employed improv techniques and related activities for composing comedic characters and collaborative comedic stories. In this article, the authors share some of the activities and what they learned about students' oral and written story‐building processes.