PIE SIG Podcast
This podcast explores the benefits of using performance related approaches and activities in the classroom and the lives of the people who use them.
PIE SIG Podcast
Episode 3: The Transformative Power of Theatre feat. Educator Kevin Bergman - Part 1
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Over three decades, educator Kevin Bergman has directed more than 100 student dramas. A Juilliard-trained actor, he discusses with Darren how theatre can revolutionize language learning and enhances students' social skills. Discover practical strategies that any teacher can implement to harness the transformative power of theatre in the classroom.
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Be sure to catch Part 2 with Kevin Bergman on October, 22nd 2025.
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Abridged Annotated bibliography
For those who are interested in using drama in their part in English language education, the following books offer concrete examples of classroom drama activities with rationale and guidance for using them. Some have short, original scripts and advice about preparing skits and plays for performance, but the emphasis in most is on drama games and exercises for students’ personal creative development and language learning, not for performance.
In the titles below, the resources strongest on scripted performance are Burke (2002) in English and Ota (2024) in Japanese.
Burke, A. F., & O'Sullivan, J. C. (2002). Stage by stage: A handbook for using drama in the second language classroom. Heinemann.
Cahnmann-Taylor, M., & McGovern, K. (2021). Enlivening instruction with drama and improv: A guide for second language and world language teachers. Routledge.
太田 雅一 Ota, M. (2024)、生徒の英会話力が向上する 英語劇・ドラマメソッド (Seito no Eikaiwa ryoku ga kojo suru Eigo Geki: Drama method Improving Students' English Conversation Skills: The English Drama Method ) 幻冬舎 Gentosha
Savage, A. (2019). The drama book: Lesson plans, activities, and scripts for English-language learners (W. Burns, Ed.). Alphabet Publishing.
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A link to Mr. Bergman's complete annotated bibliography will be supplied at a later date.
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Do you want to make your lessons more engaging and meaningful? Then join me on the PIE SIG Podcast with Darren as we explore performance in education with passionate teachers who bring it to life in their classrooms. Welcome to the PIE SIG Podcast with Darren. Today we're diving deep into a world that most language classrooms only touch on the world of full-scale theater. My guest is Kevin Bergman, a Julia-to-trained actor with decades of experience both on stage and in the classroom. He is currently the vice president and drama chair of the PIE SIG. Kevin's journey from a prestigious performing arts education to becoming a veteran educator here in Japan is full of fascinating stories and insights. And today we'll explore how theater can transform language learning not just through simple role play, but through ambitious, full-scale productions that encourage students in profound ways. Kevin, welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1Thank you very much.
DarrenSo, Kevin, I love hearing how people find their way into teaching through unexpected paths. So you're a Juliad trained actor, you know, a dream for many actors, but you ended up dedicating much of your career to education here in Japan. Please tell us about that journey.
Speaker 1Well, I think my journey is a good example of the quote Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans. I think that's John Lennon, although I hear it wasn't original with him. I fully intended to spend uh my whole life in the theater. That's what I trained for. So the process of becoming a teacher was um a sort of slow evolution, um, as was coming to Japan. Uh uh making my life here wasn't part of the grand plan either. Um it's a little complicated. Is that okay? Sure. Uh uh, but I actually came to Japan uh three separate times. Uh and each time I anticipated it being for a short period of time. And my motivation all three times was more or less to uh try and be of service to others. That's kind of reflective of my life philosophy or faith. It wasn't a career move, certainly. And I came to Japan the first time, first two times as a volunteer, volunteer language teacher. And that was back in the summers of 1981 and 1982. And I was volunteering for Protestant Christian churches who were doing community outreach to their neighborhoods through English conversation classes with a native speaker. Um, it was um really the first time for me to experience teaching or or having the title teacher. And it was the first time for me to live and be immersed in a foreign culture, and it was the first time for me to work with kids. I thought I didn't like them. Uh in this case, the kids were aged from kindergarten to high school. Uh yeah. And that summer was so many firsts, it really, it really blew me away. And it sent me back to the U.S. with all kinds of deep questions, uh, cultural questions, theological questions, vocational questions. Anyway, long story short, uh my questions took me back to school in California. I got another degree in cross-cultural studies and theology. And I worked my way through that period of my life at jobs with ethnic minority and immigrant communities and international students. And all of that really continued to change me and my outlook and what I wanted to do with my life. So in 1986, to go back to Japan with a paying job, not a volunteer, for a whole year. And at that time it made emotional and professional sense. So I went for it. That was with what became the JET program. Uh, it was originally called the Mombu Sho English Fellows, and it put me in rural Tokushima Prefecture in Shikoku. And that one year got extended to three years, uh, after which I planned to come to Tokyo to do some formal language training, but again, fate intervened, and I wound up working for an international education publishing company. And so before I knew it, I was giving JALT presentations all over the place as an educational consultant. And that led to a full-time tenured position at a uh private uh Boys Academy here in Tokyo.
DarrenI see. So that means you've been a JALT member for a very long time.
Speaker 1Yeah, well, I think I joined JALT early on, even when I was uh an ALT. Uh so that would be 1986.
DarrenAnd I guess since then you've been deeply involved in performance and education.
Speaker 1The the the good thing, how how that sort of performing performance and education stuck with it is I had the really good fortune that my school uh is famous for the freedoms it gives both to its students and its teachers. Students are pretty free, there's no uniforms, there's not a whole lot of school rules. Um, and you're sort of encouraged, both as a student and as a teacher, to what interests you. You know, if you're uh if you have a mania about seibu, yeah, go for it, you know, research it, do it. And in my case, my principal has noticed that the ESS Society club that I sponsored was consistently winning awards for English dramas and contests. And he suggested to the English department that I should consider doing that as uh as an elective class so that kids outside the the club could uh have that experience. And that led to, well, 25 years of offering that English drama experience to initially to third-year high school students, but eventually it was broadened to second-year uh high school students as well. And that combined with the ESS English drama contest plays, I think I've done a hundred and well, well, well over a hundred, maybe close to 150 dramas uh over the course of my career.
DarrenOkay, so tell us a bit about these dramas. Were they Shakespeare or modern pieces?
Speaker 1Initially we looked at movies um because movies, movie scripts, uh so I think the very first uh thing I did was Rain Man. Uh the other thing to note to note is that uh my high school, junior high school is a combination, is a boys' school, which does make it difficult to do drama because all the good stuff really is you know between men and women. Um and so you wind up, you know, changing mothers into fathers and uh uh, you know, for a long time I was I was rewriting um uh so that uh you know the the script didn't have any women in it. Um but um eventually we did Shakespeare. Shakespeare is good if you have all boys, because there was you know written that way, uh written for a company of uh male actors. The other thing that that actually was kind of unique is uh some of the kids came up with ideas for for Japanese, either Japanese movies or TV shows, manga, etc., that they said this would be this would make a really good script. And if it wasn't already in English, they said, well, we'll translate it with your help. So uh actually some of the some of the better experiences have been things that kids have found and um that we've worked on together. And actually that's been a good source of uh learning not textbook Japanese or English, but you know, colloquial, the way people really speak, what's the equivalent of that in English? Uh I learned a lot that way uh in helping them with the translations. One of the good resources, um uh actually, uh particularly for film, is uh a publishing company in Nagoya called uh Screen Screenplay Publishing or Screenplay Shipban in Japanese. And they don't they're not quite as active as they used to be. But um, for a while there, I don't know how many titles they they published each year. But what the good part about it was the script is bilingual. So, like left-hand page is English, right hand page is Japanese. Were the scripts graded at all, or were they just kept as is? Pretty much exactly as is, but they had um eventually as as they developed it, um, they had some markings on it that would say, you know, the English in this movie is uh more difficult, or this one is easier, it's clearer. Uh so they had some degree of guidance for um for the English level for Japanese readers. Uh, but it comes with you know the time the timestamp so that you can compare you know this part of the script with this part of the movie, so you can advance the movie to that part. So it's still, you know, that there's still a number of things that are imprint, and not only screenplay chip on, but other other companies have gotten into that as well. But what was great about screenplay was that they were doing, you know, like each each year they would do some of the top movies that came out in that particular year. The other companies tend to do classics, you know, like Roman Holiday or Wizard of Oz or, you know, things that are almost in public domain.
DarrenCould you tell us a bit more about that? I mean, a script is very long, so are you dividing it up into sections or are you trying to cover the whole thing?
Speaker 1Well, it's uh a whole conversation that we could have. Um I'm a stage director, and my experience is on stage, and um what makes a good stage play uh and a good play for uh English drama is not necessarily the same thing as cinema. I mean, the classic thing is, you know, if you're gonna kids say, Let's do Harry Potter, Harry Potter number one, I say, okay, how are we gonna do Kidditch on stage? You know, the the effects, you know, flying, or if you're gonna say kids want to do Star Wars, saying, well, it's really great in the movie, but you know, it's really hard to make equivalents on stage. And the other thing is that a scene, one scene in a movie, uh, a long scene is maybe more than two minutes or something like that. Whereas if you look at classic, you know, stage writing, one scene could be 20 minutes. And movies, the location, you know, it just changes from place to place to place. It's easy. You've you know, you just clip, you know, you just edit the movie. If you've got kids on stage, you've got, you know, you've got the bedroom set up, and then the next scene is, you know, a bus, and the next scene is a mountaintop. You have to change the set. And if the set takes set change takes two minutes, God help us, but if it it takes a long time, and the scene itself is 30 seconds long, uh, it doesn't make a very good stage play.
DarrenSo I'd like to know a little bit more about this. So you've got the movie, and you've got the script in this in this book, it's been translated, it's full length. A lot of movies are an hour and a half long. So I'm wondering how long it actually takes to get through it all. So, I mean, if you could imagine that you had a room full of actors who are reading the script, you know, they're not uh doing any kind of staging or costumes or uh, you know, interacting with each other in in in a physical space, but just just reading the script alone, how long would it take for that to uh be completed? I mean, uh I guess it would take even longer than the movie itself.
Speaker 1Well, again, if you depends on the level of the students that you're working with, and if you need to stop and give corrections, etc., and double the amount of running time of a movie, I would think. What I would do first off is you know, I'd look at the number of the number of students that I have and um the doability of the scene. In other words, is this something that can be done on stage? And if I'm aiming for 40 to 60 minutes, that's actually requires a good deal of practice time that I'm you know to get amateur kids, amateur students up to uh something that is sort of watchable. Um I mean, in in the theater often we say one hour of rehearsal time equals uh the the uh gain is about one minute of stage time. So if you've got a 60-minute stage presentation, it sort of represents 60 hours worth of work. So uh if it's a class and I've got 30 uh 30 class meetings, uh, and in high school that's you know 50-minute periods, um it you're not too off far off if you aim for a half hour to 40 minutes. So that means that you're gonna have to be very selective in the storytelling and pick uh you know key scenes. Um and so no matter what script usually that you're doing, it's going to involve um a selection uh of uh you know the the best, the most uh stage-worthy uh material. And that's where someone with background like I have can help. Um but students often have good ideas as well. They'll say, you know, we think this scene is really important and this scene, you know, we can we don't need this scene, we can live without it. But again, the advantage of doing a movie script is that kids have an example, you know, of you know, of the acting, of the pronunciation, of the story. Uh it's easier than if you give them a script, particularly if it's not a translated script, if it's just an English script. Um it can be kind of daunting, you know. So how how do I how do we do this? What does it sound like? Um, is it interesting? Is it fun? Um if you don't have a movie, you really have to do a sales job on uh on that particular scenario. And that's where YouTube comes in handy. Um a lot of things that I've uh tried to interest kids in. Um if there isn't a movie version of it, um, if you go online, chances are good that you can find sometimes it's not a very good, you know, like some again, same same age, like high school in in the States doing, you know, the stage version of it. But it at least gives them uh an idea of what the story is like and what the characters might be like. And um that that helps.
DarrenI'd like to know something else about this. So when the students are watching the movie, you know, they're getting a lot of information about the accent of the actor, the gestures, facial expression, staging, and so on. So when they're watching these movies, do they actually try to mimic the actor?
Speaker 1It really depends on the student. I mean, I here in Japan, the particularly the classical performances, uh, if you're talking about like Kabuki or Noh or Kyogen actors, there is the correct way to do it. And students copy the master because that's what they're supposed to do. So you're fighting against that, uh, you know, when you try to get kids to be original. If they see, you know, Robin Williams did this gesture, you know, they want to do that gesture, and I say, well, yeah, you don't have to do it that way. Um, particularly if we've you know changed the the arrangement of the of the the location. And again, with movies, you do close-ups, you do, you know, uh pan shots, you know, you do all kinds of things that the camera can do that you you you can't translate that on stage. Key point is um Dead Poet Society, which is uh uh because I teach in a boy school, and Dead Poet Society is about a boy school, it's uh that's a natural. So we've done that one.
DarrenAnd were you standing on the desk at all?
Speaker 1And not me, but then the student who plays uh um uh what 's his name? Can't remember, but... At any rate, it it goes down quite well, both with audiences and with students involved. And but there's a there's a um a famous shot, famous scene in that movie where the Robin Williams character is trying to get a shy boy to uh to read a poem emotionally. And the the camera actually does a full 360-degree rotation around the two actors. So that the the viewer kind of feels that the the feels the same thing as the student, that you know, his head is swimming. When you watch that scene in the movie, you think that's great. And then how are we going to do that on stage? You know, do we you know like turn around and around and around, or you know, how do we do it? So something like that is an example where you can't, you know, you have to tell the the actors, that's the movie, and the movie accomplishes its art with uh camera angles and uh you know the close-up shots and crane shots and things like that. And when we're doing it on for the for the stage, uh there are other ways of doing that kind of focus. Uh, and again, it helps to have the background that I have uh that I'm able to try to make equivalence. Sometimes what what looks very exciting uh on the movie screen, when you take those words and you put them on stage, you think, why isn't this as impactful as what I saw in the movie? Partially, you know, it's professional actors, it's a big deal. The total uh art of uh cinema is it's a different game. It's uh it's soccer and stage is baseball. I mean, it it it you know the it's different rules and you have to play the game differently. But sometimes it works.
DarrenFor teachers who would like to try this, you know, do you have any advice for them? So I mean would it be something that you would recommend, for example, if they just take just two minutes of the script and just deal with that rather than trying to go into the whole movie?
Speaker 1Oh yeah, yeah. Particularly as uh if you have a if you're in a secondary situation, uh high school or junior high school, um, if you have a class, if you have twenty five to forty students, your average uh story, whether it's a movie story or a uh uh piece written for the stage, um there's Roles for only a couple people, you know, a handful. So either you do double, triple casting, uh, or you have a bunch of different projects. Um and uh scene work, as it's called in um drama education, is uh very useful. I a couple of classes, that's what I did, was I divided uh classes up. Well, actually the kids divided themselves up according to the the scenes uh uh that they wanted to do. So sometimes you had two or four, and other times, you know, if it was a police drama or something like that, you had, you know, uh 10 or 12 uh people. And uh maybe not all those people appear in one scene. But uh certainly it's uh for people who wanted to sort of try out uh the idea of scripted pieces, um doing scenes uh is probably the the best way to start. Um for the high school second year uh class that I taught for I can't remember how many years, 15 years, something like that. It actually was a required course, and students had to choose either my drama course or my colleague's speech and presentation course. And each of our classes had 40 students, so ideally it would have been 2020, you know, but very often it was 65 percent chose drama. So I would have 28 or 30 students. Um sometimes what worked um was would be to divide the class up into cast, staff, um, cast and staff is is one way to do it, so that uh some people are working on scenery and lighting, costumes. I hadn't prepared anything to talk about this, but actually one of my favorite productions, uh one of my last ones, was based on a Murakami Haruki novel, Kafka on the Shore. And we were able to split our class of, I guess it was around 25 students into four groups, cast and uh then a Murakami research group that uh did some background reading and uh research and contributed stuff uh for the other students. And uh because we were doing bilingual production, which meant that in that novel the narrator is a 15-year-old boy who is also the hero. Uh and some of the first-person things that he says are very interior about what he's thinking and feeling, and other things are dialogue with others. So the way we decided to do it was dialogue with others was in English, and uh the interior thoughts were in Japanese, and those were recorded. So we had one team of students who were matching up the English and the Japanese translations and uh doing the recording of the considerable amount of recording of the uh Japanese voices, and that took a good deal of coordination. Um so the each each group had, oh, another group was doing because we were doing projections as well, so background projections, because there's a lot of different scenes in the novel. So one group was working on sets and lights, another group was doing projections, another group was doing the um Japanese uh voices and coordinate it with the English script, and then there was the actual cast group. So they had to work together, they had to work with me. It was a very exciting production.
DarrenI'm very interested in this part. So, what percentage of your students were actually taking part in the play on the stage?
Speaker 1Well, it again, it it varies. Um, the last version of my class, I didn't divide, I didn't put uh people into teams of scenery scenic work or you know backstage work, although that was always very popular if I did. The last two, three years, everybody was on stage in some way or another.
DarrenLogistically, that must be quite difficult. How did you handle that?
Speaker 1Um, some of it is the the selection of drama that you do, so that if you're doing a piece that has, in one case, we were doing a Japanese drama, which had been turned into a movie, and we had two casts. We had uh act one cast and act two cast. So that was one way of dividing it up. More work for me, but some classes decided to do two plays, not one. So that it'd have 10 kids working on the History Boys, and uh everybody else and the other 15 kids were working on, in this case, uh based on an adult novel called Holes, H-O-L-E-S Holes. So I had four classes in that school, four homerooms. So I'd have at least four dramas going, but if we did kind of dividing up the class into different plays, sometimes I would have up to six different dramas in rehearsal at the same time, which is kind of crazy.
DarrenSo probably what a lot of teachers are wondering is what is the benefit for students who are taking part in these classes? You know, what are what are they getting out of it? How do you justify it?
Speaker 1There are a lot of social and emotional benefits that uh come up, socially and emotionally. I think the the closest analogy I could give would be team sports. All the values and benefits that are generally acknowledged about that flow out of team sports are equally true for uh a drama production cast. It's camaraderie, uh doing physical actions together, you know, working toward a goal collaboratively, cooperatively. Very often, you know, the clubs in Japan are such an important part of student life. Clubs are in university circles. Um I found that um the bonding that happens between teammates, particularly in the sports clubs, really lasts a lifetime. You know, those are the lasting relationships that come out of um school life. The most intense ones are with your teammates. And uh a theater production has a similar kind of thing. Of course, as I said, with my students, they've they've already known each other, they already have to some degree knowledge of each other, but the drama brings them a different kind of knowledge of each other that they've never had before. Working on the drama together, they find new hidden talents that they didn't know their classmates had. And so I I've been very surprised, but uh in the the yearbook that uh graduation album is the way to say, uh, the English drama pages sometimes are as long as the school festival. And it's students who create this, it's not teachers or anybody else. So what that tells me is that experience uh was a very special one for them and part of their school life, of six years of school life that they they want to remember.
DarrenSo here's the follow-up question.
Speaker 1Yeah.
DarrenHow does it benefit their English?
Speaker 1Uh linguistically, uh certainly uh students are using language in a way that they don't ordinarily, shall we say, uh, for emotional reasons. Um the characters, if it's a good story, uh, have conflict. So the actual lines of the script, what students are memorizing and saying and and working on each other, will expose them to colloquial English, uh, or at least different English than they're learning in uh their standard textbooks. But the making of the drama itself, the creation, the problem solving, decision-making, all of those things, uh, the target language is English.
DarrenAnd how do you ensure this? Because I've noticed students when they're doing things like that often start using their native language.
Speaker 1Well, it it actually happens with me too. Uh in my case, I've got 50 minutes once a week. Uh, and so sometimes you have to cut to the chase, which is controversial, but I will use uh first language, I will use Japanese to explain something technical that needs to happen, or I'll say it in English and then I'll say it in Japanese just to make sure. But overall, uh the motivation is this is English class, and we're gonna try to make this an English language experience. I've worked with some groups, university student groups, where uh they tried to do everything in English, and a one group actually had a uh, I th ink what was it, a hyku en, a 100 yen penalty if you spoke Japanese offstage or on stage, or you had to cough up some money. Um but it's hard in a class situation to do that, but um overall, the amount of English usage um both on stage and offstage, for the students that I'd been working with, we also communicated a lot um between classes, either um lunch hour, they'd give up part of their lunch hour to do some rehearsals, or we increasingly, particularly after the pandemic and during the pandemic, we did a lot of things online. Uh so online conversation, Google chat kinds of, as well as uh regular social networking of with you know, line or messenger, that kind of thing. Of course, there's no guarantee that these days that it isn't machine translated, you know, that they they wrote it all up in English or in Japanese and that did a couple clicks and sent me the message in Chat GPT translated things. That's very recent. I've been retired now for this is my second year. So that whole era, uh depending on machine translations and things, that's probably more of an issue now than it was in the last uh uh 20 years. So 20 years ago, we student would have to sort of come up with the English to answer my email.
DarrenThank you very much, Kevin. We've now reached the end of part one. In part two, Kevin shares some incredible moments from his productions, and we'll also talk about how any teacher, regardless of training, can start using performance in their classes. Be sure to tune in. Thank you for listening. Until next time, stay focused and keep performing.