Artist Visit for the PAGES Program: Tableau and Narrative

As part of PAGES, a literacy and arts integration program through the Wexner Center, a resident artist comes to the classroom before and after each of three art-integration field trips throughout the year.  The visiting artist has a direct, real-world connection to the experience the students have while at the Wex.  When I was part of the PAGES program, I had graffiti artists, cartoonists, actors, poets and others in my classroom working with students and co-teaching with me.

For Miwa Matreyek’s play This World Made Itself, theater educator Pam Decker came and worked with Mandy Bruney’s students using a technique called “tableau.”

For the activity, Bruney had taken pieces of students’ narratives and distributed them to groups of three to four students.  They were asked to choose a beginning, middle and end of the story together.  After they have chosen the three moments, they had to decide how to create a “frozen” re-enactment of the scene using body language and facial expressions.  Each group then presented the three scenes to the rest of the class.

From watching Decker, I enjoyed how she “coached” students through the presentations.  For example, she asked questions of the students presented, modeled facial expressions for them and provided formative feedback for improvement.  This was a more “interactive” form of presentation that I had seen in the past.  I feel like students learned more from this style where the end product was about “process” and not a “product.”