Every summer at Young Life camps across the country, a large group of high school and college students, along with adults, work together to create a frozen scene. As campers emerge from their cabins, they witness a still life portrait of the old west until the sound of a horn sends the characters into motion. After 90 seconds of motion, the characters are once again frozen in place. Campers are encouraged to walk amongst the scene and are then sent back to their cabins to put on their own costumes. This frozen depiction of a scene is called tableau; meaning visual presentation in French (Wilhelm, 2002, p.116).
Wilhelm uses tableau as a strategy for helping students visualize, perceive and consider after reading a text (p.119). The coolest part about using tableau to engage with a text is that it uses visual and kinesthetic intelligences that are normally not used in a classroom. From my years of teaching and from having my own son, I have learned how much the use of kinesthetic experiences is important for boys. Students understand a text at a whole new level when they are allowed to live through it. The most interesting part is how tableau can be used with non-fiction in all content area classrooms.
Just like all the enactments in Wilhelm's book, their are many different variations of tableau that allow students (and teachers) to never get bored. Wilhelm did state that with all the different enactment options it is important not to continue to use one after the students have mastered it, but to continue to challenge them with continued new ones.
I myself am a visual learner. It's much easier for me to memorize your phone number if you write them down instead of reading it to me. So I always try to employ strategies echoing with as many kinds of learning styles as possible.
ReplyDeleteThese enactment strategies touch on all the learning styles better than any I've ever seen.
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