#nontraditional learning

🌱🔬 Learning Comes Full Circle 🔬🌱

Our Upper Elementary students recently had the opportunity to take their Science Fair projects one step further—by becoming teachers! They proudly presented their experiments to our toddler community, sharing their discoveries with curiosity, patience, and enthusiasm.

This kind of cross-age learning is a powerful part of the Montessori experience. As the older students explain their work, they deepen their understanding, strengthen communication skills, and build confidence. Meanwhile, our youngest learners are inspired by real examples of inquiry, creativity, and problem-solving—planting the seeds for future exploration.

🌱 Hands-On Learning in Action! 🌱

Our Upper Elementary students enjoyed a meaningful morning in the garden, harvesting our first carrot (!), onions, curly kale, mixed salad greens, and calendula from our raised beds—grown with their own care and patience.

Through experiences like this, children deepen their understanding of biology, responsibility, and the interconnectedness of living things. From nurturing the soil to gathering food and even providing for our animals, they see firsthand how their efforts make a difference.

(I wrote this for school. It's got some preliminary ideas to be expanded upon later)

This essay aims to explore using the principles and methods of short-form improvisational play to help survivors of early childhood trauma to learn better. The idea is inspired by Catherall’s (2013) lecture on how childhood trauma negatively impacts one’s ability to be grounded, to pay attention, and to learn in traditional education environments.

The idea builds upon the diverse body of existing theories and applications on the use of play and/or theater for the mentally ill and/or marginalized populations. Play therapy grew out of the child psychotherapy theories of Anna Freud, Margaret Lowenfeld, and Melanie Klein (British Association of Play Therapists, 2011) and uses play as a way to reach children and to help them address and resolve their psychosocial issues (Lilly, O’Connor, Krull, Schaefer, Landreth, & Pehrsson, n.d.). Psychodrama (called sociodrama when done in groups) uses “guided dramatic action” to help people clarify issues, increase physical and emotional wellbeing, enhance learning, and develop new skills (American Society of Group Psychotherapy and Psychodrama, 2013).

Short-form improvisation involves short theater games with predetermined rules (Chicago Improv Festival, n.d.). The mother of short-form improv was Viola Spolin, who founded the nation’s first improv theater and created the “Spolin Theater Games,” upon which SecondCity was founded. As a teen in the 1920s, Ms. Spolin trained in group social work and experimental theater at Neva Boyd’s RecreationalTraining School at Hull House in Chicago (Zellner, Cubbage, & Joseph, 2013). Neva Boyd, one of the nation’s first social workers, was an early proponent of using play and games in groups as an educational tool for the purposes of socialization training and personal growth (Simon, n.d.; Zellner et al., 2013). Boyd’s work began with poor urban youths and progressed to the physically and mentally handicapped, delinquent children, and the institutionalized mentally ill (Simon, n.d.). Spolin herself conducted groups with poor urban youths at Hull House from 1938 to 1941. The original inspiration for “Spolin Theater Games,” in fact, came from her attempt to bridge the communication, cultural, and learning gap that she encountered while teaching drama to these youths. Her games were successful. One of her supervisors commended her for her creative experiments that enabled a cast of “‘typical slum urchins’” to put on an apparently articulate and engrossing theater performance (Zellner et al., 2013).

Many of the “slum urchins” with whom Spolin – and Boyd – worked may have experienced early childhood trauma. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (2013) reports a 63.9 percent prevalence of adverse childhood experiences among American adults. The risk of experiencing childhood trauma is also greater among individuals who grow up in low socioeconomic status households (Hyman, 2000; MacMillan, 2000; Zielinski, 2009; Kunst et al., 2010; as cited in Mock and Arai, 2010).

Early trauma negatively impacts one’s ability to learn because an individual with early trauma is easily hyperaroused, and attention is the first thing to go when one enters arousal (Catherall, 2013). Early trauma among Spolin’s students may thus have contributed to the challenges she faced in adequately teaching them.

There was something intuitive and wise to Spolin’s use of experiential teaching methods for her students. Non-verbal, expressive, and experiential ways of engagement and education are more easily accessible than lectures to individuals in higher states of arousal. Further, early trauma that occurs before formation of verbal abilities is never integrated into declarative memory or verbal narrative but can only be recalled via enactments (Catherall, 2013). Theater games may thus be better tools than traditional methods for grounding, teaching, and engaging individuals with early trauma.

REFERENCES

American Society of Group Psychotherapy and Psychodrama. (n.d.). What is psychodrama, sociometry, and sociodrama?. Retrieved from http://www.asgpp.org/pdf/What%20is%20PD,%20etc.pdf

British Association of Play Therapists. (2011). A history of play therapy. Retrieved from http://www.bapt.info/historyofpt.htm

Catherall, D.R. (2013). Lecture. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2013). Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study: Prevalence of individual adverse childhood experiences. Retrieved from http://www.cdc.gov/ace/prevalence.htm

Chicago Improv Festival. (n.d.) Short form. Retrieved from http://chicagoimprovfestival.org/events/categories/short-form/

Lilly, J.P., O’Connor, KI., Krull, T., Schaefer, C., Landreth, G., & Pehrsson, D.E. (n.d.). Play therapy makes a difference!. Retrieved from http://www.a4pt.org/ps.playtherapy.cfm?ID=1653

Mock, S.E., & Arai, S.M. (2010). Childhood trauma and chronic illness in adulthood: Mental health and socioeconomic status as explanatory factors and buffers. Frontiers in Psychology, 1. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2010.00246

Simon, W.P. (n.d.). Neva Leona Boyd, a biographical sketch. Retrieved from The Social Welfare History Project site: http://www.socialwelfarehistory.com/people/boyd-neva-leona/

Zellner, D., Cubbage, C., & Joseph, B., curators. (2013). Viola Spolin: Improvisation & intuition [Exhibit].Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Library.