Freddie (Fiona) Harris Ramsby
Assignments & Activities Archive
Assignment Description
In first-year writing classrooms, embodied teaching methods, such as Kathryn Dawson and Bridget Kiger Lee’s drama-based pedagogy (DBP), “[provide] an innovative means to stimulate students’ creativity…to foster learning that sticks, cultivating brains that retain information” (Harris Ramsby 1). Combining Newman P. Birk and Genevieve B. Birk’s analytical framework for identifying frames and slanting in language, as well as Brazilian theater director and activist Augusto Boal’s Image Theater (Theatre of the Oppressed, 112), this assignment uses DBP to assist students’ analysis of political bias in news media, helping them assess how left-leaning and right-leaning sources construct divergent versions of the same reality. The assignment’s ultimate goal is to help students build foundational media literacy skills they can then apply to evaluating other news sources. With their instructor in a facilitator role—guiding movement and prompting observations—students craft physical tableaux to render visibly tangible how news sources frame the same event differently. By positioning their bodies to represent what sources include, exclude, elevate, or marginalize, students might understand this analytical heuristic kinesthetically rather than abstractly. This dramatic approach is especially vital for developing college writers’ critical literacy, where over-reliance on AI might threaten cognitive development if not appropriately mediated. Instructors can adapt this activity for any first-year or advanced writing course focused on critical reading and media literacy, rhetorical analysis, and/or research source evaluation.