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MARCH 2005

Interview with Gail Noppe-Brandon:
Creator
of a New Methodology

By Joan Baum, Ph.D.

It isn’t often that a writer with dynamic ideas about how to transform the teaching of communication skills can point to her own public school child as an example, but Gail Noppe-Brandon, whose slim, eloquent book, Find Your Voice: A Methodology for Enhancing Literacy Through Re-Writing and Re-Acting  (reviewed in this issue) certainly knows first hand how a shy seven-year-old can come to life, creatively and intellectually, under the tutelage of a patient teacher and an imaginative idea. She also knows the importance of sustaining the right teacher and the right environment where a model can take root and grow. Ms. Noppe-Brandon’s methodology, an innovative integration of re-acting and re-writing skills, has already attracted attention. Schools such as the New York Museum School in Chelsea, which has served as a demonstration site, and successful teacher training sessions at various venues in the city, including Bank Street and several middle schools and high schools, have prompted the author–educator to seek out an academic home – ideally college-based where a summer teaching institute might be established. But Ms. Noppe-Brandon also knows from personal and professional experience that good ideas, effectively realized, can become casualties of bureaucracy. A new principal comes in and wants his or her own people, resources, ideas, so out goes a recently trained cadre of young Find Your Voice acolytes. A permanent academic center might counter this problem, as might a video.

Indeed, Ms. Noppe-Brandon is at work on a documentary in the tradition of the 2003 French film “To Be And To Have,” whose director Nicolas Philibert wanted to show the “magic of education.” Of course, a one-room village schoolhouse in rural Saint-Etienne Sur Usson, with a class of 13 children, ages 3-10, is hardly crowded urban New York City, but the point of the inspirational film, which Ms. Noppe-Brandon much admires, is that the energy, enthusiasm, and loving determination of the teacher Georges Lopez show him reaching everyone, the real meaning, one might say, of Leave No Child Behind. And no teacher, either. To that end, Ms. Noppe-Brandon, who now trains approximately 100 public school teachers a year, knows how time-consuming such labor-intensive work can be, but she believes that her pedagogical model can go a long way to showing teachers how to engage students in a sensitive and rigorous way to confront their fears. Contrary to general impressions, many teachers themselves have problems when they have to meet with or address their peers, even though they opted for a life of teaching. With Ms. Noppe-Brandon’s techniques they can overcome their anxieties and, more important, understand empathically how difficult such hurdles are for their students.

One of the strongest selling points of Ms. Noppe-Brandon’s methodology is its flexibility. It can be applied in a semester, a month in summer or even on a weekend. For a number of reasons, however, she would like to see Find Your Voice become a regular after-school program. The 3-5 or 3-6 time slot is critical, she notes, especially since after 9 / 11 parents have shown reluctance to have their children travel to after school activities, especially in winter when it gets dark early. Moreover, many children take on part-time jobs or attend tutoring workshops to prepare for state-mandated tests. Who needs writing and acting in plays! They do, she says, and if only licensed teachers could be provided in that time slot and parents, especially newly arrived immigrants, could be persuaded that the dramatic activities described in the book have immediate and long-lasting cognitive value. The method is for anyone and everyone. Too many children  are being left behind and too many young teachers are not staying in education because they are frustrated trying to express their creativity. But as Ms. Noppe-Brandon, a Yeats scholar, might quote to them, from “To A Child Dancing in the Wind”: “Dance there upon the shore;/What need have you to care/For wind or water’s roar?”#

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