Berrytales
Author: Cheryl E. Davis
Actors are Readers, Classrooms are Stages, and Everyone Stars in Berrytales. Plays in one act for
middle-schoolers that combine dialogue, story narrative, improvisation, and content -- and get
students to think about their own thinking.
An Instructional Framework for Using the Plays
These plays are written especially for secondary students and their teachers to jump-start and
improve cognition in the classroom.
Cognitive learning (and teaching) is most like an archeological dig—after the obvious discoveries,
it’s most successfully done in the worst or least likely situations. It’s messy and time-consuming.
The best tools money can buy don’t work as well or as safely as common objects improvised to
fit the needs. There’s a good chance some thief or graverobber has been there before you
without a thought to how important the goods would be as artifacts.
And unless you find nothing at all, you often don’t know exactly what you have, until later. And
then the government of the country it was found in can keep it and not even show it to the public.
But regardless of the endings, the stories of the dig will be told over and over again, until others
remembering the stories go out and dig for themselves and tell their own stories.
Therefore, before you dig, here are a few of the embedded assumptions and realities of Berrytales.
- Plays are written to be read out loud and acted out in class, as well as performed for an audience.
- Plays, including Berrytales, are made to be edited, abridged, and adjusted to fit the needs and circumstances of the players and audience.
- Performing the plays and/or scenes from the plays motivates and drives the reading and rereading and therefore increases concrete to abstract understanding of characters, concepts, and content, with a special focus on Science, English, History, and Theater Arts.
- These plays are written to share and improve student and teacher knowledge of hidden rules that exist in the use of language and learning behaviors in the frameworks of poverty, middle class and wealth.
- Berrytales are written to model and improve test-taking strategies, learning skills, and casual to formal-language mediation.
- These plays are written with four primary characters in order to create and model classroom reading/performing teams.
- All primary characters, including teachers’ roles, have been given opposite-gender identities and names, in order to secure character/reader identification.
- Team reading and production of plays ensures active student participation and responsibility in the less-threatening framework of small groups.
- Other character traits and background information will be evident as the plays unfold or will be supplied by students as they read, interpret, develop, and perform each play.
- In odd-numbered classes, or where otherwise needed,* two students may share one part (*for example: to back up students with reading/English, mastery or confidence problems).
- Plays have been and can be translated into other languages for and by ESL students to work on and be performed in their own languages as valid optional classwork. This also gives English-only students access to understanding and respect for other students’ experiences and languages.