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?”#
