Imagining to Learn: Inquiry, Ethics, and Integration Through Drama

By Jeffrey D. Wilhelm

Book Overview

If you are interested in creating an integrated learning environment in which students become deeply engaged in reading, writing, and inquiry while they explore the ethical dimensions of the curriculum, then this highly accessible book will be invaluable to you. In Imagining to Learn, Jeffrey Wilhelm and Brian Edmiston demonstrate how drama taps into the imagination to create powerful learning contexts.

Imagining to Learn moves drama into the mainstream of elementary and middle school teaching, learning, and curriculum. It is filled with examples of how teachers and students together can create contexts that tap into students' energies, abilities, and questions--contexts where students can discover a reason to read, a need to think, and a community that cares about their ideas. Readers will discover new methodologies and techniques that are rarely used in the U.S. They will also become familiar with drama as a method of performance-based assessment and ways to engage in research with students. The book shows how to adapt these methods into a flexible set of strategies to help students read with better comprehension, learn sophisticated and abstract content, explore values, and forge new understandings. Drama, as Wilhelm and Edmiston use it, enables students to "see" what they are reading and learning, create mental models and coherent networks of thought, apply and play out possibilities and consequences in a field of safety. The stories in this book demonstrate that drama can be easily introduced to students and successfully used by both beginning and experienced teachers.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 043507041X
• ISBN13: 9780435070410
• Release Date: January 1998
• Publisher: Heinemann Drama
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.62 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.6" x 9.2"
• Grade Range: Grades 6 to 12

Customer Reviews

It Was Great to go back then...

I was one of Jeffrey Wilhelm's 7th grade students, and actually, I am one of the ones who is mentioned in this book. i remember filling out the endless forms for allowing my interviews and work to be allowed into this book.When I was presented with the book in 2000, about 5 years after my 7th grade year, I was excited. The book described my 7th grade reading class experience perfectly, and the techniques were ones that i experienced firsthand, which excited all of my classmates, as well as myself, about reading. I don't think any of us read that much for fun as we did for that class.I read the book from cover to cover, even though only one chapter pertained to me, and i am not going into the teaching field. if you are looking at getting your students, or yourself into reading, get this book.

Easy to read and full of ideas!

IMAGINING TO LEARN is the most readable of the five books I have read on process drama. Wilhelm and Edmiston write with personality, which seems to be rare in the field. I found seventeen drama strategies scattered through the book. Having these strategies close at hand makes it easier to guide the students as they take off with a topic. The chapter on using drama for inquiry was intriguing. It makes me want to teach my next class as an investigation, using drama strategies plus other comprehension strategies. Brain toys are fun!