Children taught me how to teach. If they are disinterested, disengaged and depressed, learning is an uphill battle and teacher burnout is almost inevitable. But if one can engage the active energy of children, true learning can take place. In my workshops, I customarily use a mixed bag of games, songs, stories and writing activities to activate participation.

Drama in education builds naturally upon a child’s natural propensity to play make believe. By placing children in role as characters in an unfolding and flexible story, drama in education allows the creative teacher to introduce challenges and complexity as a means of developing academic skills, attitudes and habits of mind. In role as characters in a story, children converse, respond, argue, write and discuss as would the characters they are playing and bringing to life in the classroom drama.

For a more complete discussion of this method, see The Arts and Play as Educational Media in the Digital Age. Co-authored with Carmine Tabone. (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2020). Winner of the Susanne Langer Award.

Storytelling binds us to the wisdom, humor, and values of different generations and other cultures. It comes in all sizes, shapes and forms of media. Stories can be mediated and shared through ritual, costume, dance, music, art, song, plays and, of course, words.

Over the 40 years I worked with children in Jersey City, I made a special effort to include at least one story in my workshops and to make storytelling a daily feature of life at Camp Liberty.

I also wrote and directed several plays based upon folktales, fairytales and myths from around the world. Among the plays which I adapted for the stage were “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” “Alejandra the Fearless,” “King Midas,” “The Magic Ring,” “Aladdin and the Magic Lamp,” “The White Snake,” “Jack and the Beanstalk,” “The Three Ravens,” and “The Swallow and the Tom Cat.”

Thanks to the generosity of Nicola Stemmer and his “9 Lives Recording Studio,” I was able to produce this album of children singing camp songs as a fund raiser for Camp Liberty.

For purchase contact: The Educational Arts Team, 300 Morris Pesin Drive, Jersey City, NJ 07305.

In order for serious learning to prosper, university students also need to be energized and engaged. Week after week of lectures, tests and term papers, are a cure for insomnia, not an effective method of teaching. I often break the class into pairs or small groups so that they can share and discuss various points of view. Interpersonal activities are also a great way of connecting students of various ethnicities and backgrounds who may never had the opportunity to meet and talk with each other.

As with children, university students engage a subject more deeply and openly by participating in drama. In reflecting on Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, students are placed in role as reporters who investigate the circumstances surrounding the violence at a pizzeria in Brooklyn. How would The New York Post report the story differently than the Amsterdam News? Whose voices would be heard and taken more seriously? Whose voices would be ignored or misquoted? What images would be used to tell the story? How would media reportage affect our understandings of what happened?

For a detailed outline of this workshop see “Reporting the Right Thing: Exploring Media Bias in Reporting the News,” (with Carmine Tabone and Dina Bruno), Explorations in Media Ecology, 2008, Vol. 7, No. 1.

As we enter more deeply into the digital age, children need to have opportunities away from screens, in environments that are interpersonal and face-to-face.

For a more complete discussion of the importance of interactive forms of play, see:

“A Question of Balance: Children, Pedagogy and Play in the Age of Digital Technology," Ricerche di Pedagogia e Didattica (Journal of Theories and Research in Education), Universitá di Bologna, Vol. 12, No.2, 2017. “The Media Ecology of Play: A Preliminary Probe of Childhood Play in the Digital Age,” with Carmine Tabone. Explorations in Media Ecology. Vol. 16, No. 1, March 2017.