Wilhelm, Chapter 4 - Using Drama to Extend the Reader

By now, Wilhelm has shown us what good readers do when reading, but how do we bridge the gap between those who do it right and those who don't do it at all? How do we convince the disenfranchised, the jaded, those who have given up? If a reader needs to participate in a text in order to “get” the text, then teachers need to somehow open that world up those students who have lost their way.

Drama is a great bridge to most of those students because it does everything a reader is supposed to do: it creates an active interest in stories. Drama forces students to think differently about the reading process, converting them from recipients to participants. The three students Wilhelm uses as case studies, although of varying reading abilities, all had the same difficulty understanding that reading requires them to do more than just understand the words they are reading. Before drama, they got nothing more out of the stories they read than the words on the page.

Through the use of various drama techniques (see 100-101), Wilhelm was able to teach his students to put themselves into the shoes of characters in the stories they read. They learned empathy. This ability opened up new dimensions of reading, because they were no longer confined to a single plot line. They could examine scenes from every angle; they could guess what might happen next; they could imagine how the story would have been different under different circumstances; they could extrapolate what occurred in the spaces neglected by the author.

For me, the most important benefit of using drama to teach literature is Wilhelm's students learned to love literature. They would read for pleasure. It's also important to note that his students wanted to be able to respond to literature in their own terms. When Marvin read his first book by himself, he told his teacher “I liked it, and I don't want anybody to ask me any questions about it” (110).