Carmine Tabone - Böcker

The digital revolution we are now entering as educators is an unchartered sea pregnant with wondrous possibilities but laden with a minefield of unforeseen consequences. A pedagogy that overlooks or downplays the disruptive and often dangerous influence of digital media on childhood development is necessarily a very shortsighted one. More than just highlighting our misgivings about digital media, however, this book has a purpose far more ambitious and infinitely more useful. Based upon 45 years of work with young people in Jersey City classrooms, day camps, housing projects, libraries, church basements and community centers, the authors propose a pedagogical strategy that uses hands-on experiences in the arts as a strategy to offset and counterbalance the dominance of digital media in the lives of children. Rather than call for the elimination of digital media—clearly an impossibility even if it were desirable—the authors maintain that children need to be exposed to non-digital, non-electronic experiences that cultivate alternative ways of thinking, feeling, and being in the world. In sum, the book does not call for an end to the digital, but outlines ways in which the arts and creative forms of play help to establish a balance in the education and socialization of children as we enter more deeply into the Digital Age.

The digital revolution we are now entering as educators is an unchartered sea pregnant with wondrous possibilities but laden with a minefield of unforeseen consequences. A pedagogy that overlooks or downplays the disruptive and often dangerous influence of digital media on childhood development is necessarily a very shortsighted one. More than just highlighting our misgivings about digital media, however, this book has a purpose far more ambitious and infinitely more useful. Based upon 45 years of work with young people in Jersey City classrooms, day camps, housing projects, libraries, church basements and community centers, the authors propose a pedagogical strategy that uses hands-on experiences in the arts as a strategy to offset and counterbalance the dominance of digital media in the lives of children. Rather than call for the elimination of digital media—clearly an impossibility even if it were desirable—the authors maintain that children need to be exposed to non-digital, non-electronic experiences that cultivate alternative ways of thinking, feeling, and being in the world. In sum, the book does not call for an end to the digital, but outlines ways in which the arts and creative forms of play help to establish a balance in the education and socialization of children as we enter more deeply into the Digital Age.

Here, the authors provide dramatic strategies accompanied by age-appropriate stories and poems from around the world that address such issues as sharing, caring, cooperation, consequences, and bullying in order to create a positive classroom environment. The students' enactments take them to different lands around the globe, back into time, and into their very own neighborhoods. The varied theatrical forms included in this book—pantomime plays, shadow theater, living newspaper, story theater, museum theater, and creative tableaus—span the full spectrum of current drama used in the classroom. To help students create their own variations of the stories with their own dialogue, the authors provide easy-to-follow structures. The framework of Warm-up Development, and Wrap-up, allows teachers and students to discover challenging inquiry and writing techniques and participate in mind-opening discussion and enrichments that can be applied across the curriculum. All activities were designed to promote a deeper sense of trust, mutual respect, and pride in working together.This book will be a most welcome addition to a teachers' "must have" list of practical books for the classroom.Visit our website for Sample Readings including a full table of contents!