Listening to the Silences: A Teacher’s First Year in Words and Music

Authors

  • Charles Vanover University of South Florida Saint Petersburg

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18432/R2CC7T

Keywords:

beginning teachers, interviews, personal narratives, ethnodrama, teacher induction, Chicago Public Schools

Abstract

Listening to the Silences is an ethnodrama – an example of verbatim theatre that evokes a teacher’s first year in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) based on the words voiced during a series of four interviews sessions conducted by the author. The protagonist, Indiana Ingelside, spent her first year in CPS in an African American school in one of Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods. The show is intended to help the audience reflect on the beginning teacher’s experiences of working in that setting. The script evokes the challenges of teaching within environments shaped by social policies that do not address, and frequently exacerbate, the poverty, racism, and other forms of injustice that shape the lives of children and families of color. The article begins with the complete playscript and then concludes with an afterword that describes what the author learned from developing and producing the show. Photos from the Philadelphia workshops are included.



Author Biography

Charles Vanover, University of South Florida Saint Petersburg

Papers

Vanover, C. (2015). Inquiry theatre. Qualitative Inquiry

http://qix.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/03/24/1077800415572395.full.pdf?ijkey=p9HsszvaGaDC8yM&keytype=finite

Vanover, C. (2013). ‘Teaching the power of the word.’ International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education (QSE). 27 (7), 922-942
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09518398.2013.820859
http://dspace.nelson.usf.edu/xmlui/handle/10806/6250

Vanover, C. & Saldaña, J. (2005) ‘Chalkboard concerto: Growing up as a teacher in the Chicago Public Schools’. Chapter in ‘ Ethnodrama: An Anthology of Reality Theater', edited by Johnny Saldana. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
http://dspace.nelson.usf.edu/xmlui/handle/10806/6222

 

Select Conference Presentations

Vanover, C. (2015). Coding for oral history portraits, ethnodramas, and other performances. Paper to be presented at as part of the symposium “Coding for Interpretation and Performance.” Mihas, P., Saldana, J., S., Keene, E., & Vanover, C. Presented the 10th International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry Champaign-Urbana, IL. 4/2014

Vanover, C. (2015). ‘Using ethnodrama to understand and communicate interview data’ Paper to be presented at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association. Arts-Based Educational Research Special Interest Group. Chicago, IL. 4/2015

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Downloads

Published

2016-07-16

How to Cite

Vanover, C. (2016). Listening to the Silences: A Teacher’s First Year in Words and Music. Art/Research/International:/A/Transdisciplinary/Journal, 1(1), 174–207. https://doi.org/10.18432/R2CC7T