Upside Down at the Carnival: Creating Bakhtin's Carnival With a Postmodern Text and Process Drama to Facilitate Children's Inference

Abstract

A case study was carried out within a primary school to investigate how it taught inference. A whole class, explicit teaching approach, was used. It was felt that this did not give students the opportunity to bring their personal response to a text or recognise the fact that many texts are open to different interpretations. Therefore, a different approach was initiated. Using a practitioner inquiry methodology, three Year 6 classes studied Gary Crew's postmodern text The Watertower over a short period. They used process drama techniques to generate their own meaning from the text. Observations were kept, and group interviews were held with six focus students. The findings indicated that when students are offered the opportunity to create meaning from a postmodern text, all students were engaged and could make a range of sophisticated inferences. The students' engagement with the visual images was so high that it became reminiscent of Bakhtin's concept of Carnival thereby turning normal classroom practices upside down. The limitations of this research included the fact that this approach was temporary and just one text was used over a short period of time. Notwithstanding this, there is an argument for using creative approaches to facilitate students' actively seeking meaning from texts.