Learning Story Through Musicals
How using songs from our favorite musicals can help bring stories to life
Welcome to From the Teacher’s Desk, where we take turns further reflecting on our episodes and applications to the classroom.
I have always loved music and musicals. I was raised on the classics, such as Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Oliver, and The King and I. My sisters and I would watch our favorite musicals on VHS, nearly wearing out the tapes in our efforts to memorize the lines and music. By the time I was in college, my tastes had matured into the theater of a new generation, RENT, Les Miserables, and Miss Saigon taking over my CD player as I searched for any and every way I could see the shows live.
Anyone who has listened to our podcast long enough knows that Alicia and I not only love musical theater, but it is both a part of our personal stories and our teaching lives.
While I’ve never used full musicals to teach a particular literature lesson, I’ve been known to pick and choose certain songs from my favorite shows to teach specific lessons. In the past year on the podcast, we have discussed Hadestown, West Side Story, Dear Evan Hansen, Cyrano, and Tick, Tick…Boom! While all five of these musicals are very different stories with their own unique music and presentation, they also have elements that are applicable in the classroom.
Here are three musical numbers that I have used to help teach different lessons in my classroom.
“Bui Doi” from Miss Saigon
I saw Miss Saigon for the first time when I was a college student studying abroad in England. The musical fused together my love for history and a tragic love story all while taking place during one of my favorite periods of American history: the Vietnam War.
Over the course of my teaching career, I have used both Fallen Angels and The Things They Carried as major works to teach this period of American history. I’ve also found that using music of the period and songs written since the period that talk about Vietnam, helps students better understand the emotional and political toll of the conflict. I have used “Bui Doi” to teach them about the biracial babies that were left behind when their fathers were either killed in action or sent home. Many of these babies were the result of a single night encounter or rape. Very few were the result of a loving encounter like that portrayed in Miss Saigon. But all of those children were treated as second-class citizens because they were a physical reminder of a military action that most Vietnamese citizens wanted to move on from.
The song, which discusses what American veterans should do for the children that were left behind, tells an often forgotten story about war.
“I Want You” and “Strawberry Fields” from Across the Universe
These visual masterpieces use the music of the Beatles to show the human cost of our involvement in Vietnam. Alicia and I used both of these pieces when we worked together to teach The Things They Carried. These pieces could also be paired with the draft episode in This Is Us to show students how young men were selected for the draft and then what they had to undergo to be determined fit to fight for the US military.
“Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story” from Hamilton
Teaching students how to write honest memoir can be difficult because they tend to catalogue the events that happened to them instead of transforming those events into an engaging narrative. One of my favorite narrative assignments is to have students write a personal narrative that formulates an argument: how did that particular event shape their perspective on any given issue? It challenges them to consider that everyone has a story and understanding that story can help us better understand the what and the why of people’s beliefs.
I also want them to understand the importance of knowing how to effectively tell their own story. The final number from Lin Manuel Miranda’s Pullizer Prize winning musical highlights the importance of who is left to tell our story because it determines what story about us is told.
PBS Learning Media also has an excellent lesson plan that I modified to use with my students in understanding who tells history.
We would like to hear from you, also. How have you used musicals or parts of musicals in your own classroom? What advice would you give to teachers?
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