CNY Grants for Arts in Education - art$TART

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Elementary and Syracuse Children's Theatre

We Asked:
• Is it possible to teach history to elementary school children so that they not only remember the facts, the dates, the people, but also comprehend the emotions and humanity behind the historical event?
• How do the performing arts enable students to gain a more thorough understanding of the reality of the historical time period of the Underground Railroad?
• Can students really learn more and retain more of what they learn when the lessons are taught through the performing arts?

The biggest challenge we faced at the onset of this project was that students at this age and population have trouble grasping the concepts of the times that have passed.  It is difficult for them to envision a world that is so very different than the one they know. 

After completing a pre-write about what they knew of the Underground Railroad, the students had regular lessons about this time period. 

Over the next consecutive sessions, the students built on these basic techniques and Elisabeth started to work with them on characterization.	TA's Jennie Dombrowski and Elisabeth Holmes started to visit the classroom about twice a week and began teaching the students some basic fundamentals of theatre like focus, vocal projection, and body movement.

	From character work, they moved onto working on tableaux, which allowed the students to explore the types of situations these strong characters would have lived through.

From these exercises came the scenes that made up the play: leaving in the middle of the night, sneaking past guard dogs, traveling with a sick & coughing child, hiding behind bookcases, and crossing into Canada on a fishing boat. Along the way the escaping slaves discover a quilt.  The design warns them of danger, and so they must run faster and try to divert slave hunters that are on their trail.

The students chose this particular quilt after studying many quilt designs from this period, and then incorporated the meaning of this quilt into their play. The quilt design, “Tumbling Blocks” meant danger, that slave hunters may be close by.  In the play, seeing this quilt led the slaves to use onions to cover their scent as they circled their tracks and ran ahead of the slave hunters. After choosing the design, the students each decorated one square of the quilt.

Students work on designing their quilt squares.

After learning performing arts techniques, developing characters, and improvising scenes for the play, rehearsals began. And on April 4th the students had the opportunity to perform their original play at the Civic Center as part of Syracuse Children’s Theatre’s 2006 – 2007 Community Outreach Program Showcase.

Despite some technical glitches that were WAY beyond their control, the kids pulled off a great performance.  They were in character, they showed emotion, they remembered their lines. And they never buckled under the pressure!

The whole program concluded with a performance for their peers at Dr. King School and a post-writing exercise where the kids had the chance to write about what they learned, proving that this experience had really given them insight into the reality of the Underground Railroad era.

Comments
from the teaching artist: "The students. . . had more than enough creative and interesting ideas to make the project their own. Even though many of them had little to no knowledge of the time period at the start, by the end they had all learned a great deal and had gained a level of understanding of the real-life struggles these people had gone through."

from the project coordinator: "When acting as the people who lived through these experiences, the kids make a personal emotional connection to the subject.  Through this emotional connection, the subject matter became more important to them, and so they remembered more."

from students' writing: "I know that the underground railroad had conductors....Quakers led slaves to house to house.  They wanted them [slaves] to know how to read quilts so they knew what to do.  All the quilts meant something different.  So they did whatever the quilt told them to do. They also told them that dogs may smell them.  They also told them that the North Star would help them get to freedom, so now they either go to Canada or Pennsylvania.  They all wanted Freedom.  If they got whipped they tried again."

"Trying to escape was hard.  You had to hide in the morning and run at night....And they  sometimes rubbed onion on their feet so the dogs won’t pick up the scent."

"They [slaves] were brave people. There was a fugitive slave act so when they tried to escape, they had to go to Canada.  If they were in America, they could be brought back."