VIRTUAL Session Block 6

Saturday, July 30th, 2:45-4pm (EDT)

All of the following sessions will be hosted on Zoom Meeting. You will be sent an email, 24 hours prior to the next day's events, which will contain all of the log-on details for each event. As in an in-person Conference, please feel free to select whichever workshop you would like to attend in the moment.

Network: K-8

Biblioburro: Children around the World Access Books through Story Drama

Session Chair: Jonathan P. Jones

In this interactive story drama workshop, participants will engage in a demo lesson for 2nd and 3rd grade drama framed around two picture books (both available in English and Spanish): Biblioburro: A True Story from Colombia (written and illustrated by Jeanette Winter) and Waiting for the Biblioburro (written by Monica Brown and illustrated by John Parra). The goal of the lesson is for students to explore how children around the world access books through drama. Participants will enact moments from the existing narratives and explore creative interpretations that expand the story. Participants will respond to the work they are creating and investigate connections between the texts, their lives, and their understandings of other cultures. The selected books are literally about children in Colombia accessing books, but we will also talk about drama as a tool to explore literature, culture, and language. After participating in the demo lesson, the facilitator will unpack the structure and strategies from the lesson. Participants will consider adaptations and modifications to the demo lesson for their various populations. Additional picture books to explore within this theme include My Librarian Is a Camel: How Books Are Brought to Children Around the World by Margriet Ruurs and The Librarian of Basra: A True Story from Iraq by Jeanette Winter.

Network: Various

The Need for Abuse Prevention in Theatres: Strategies & Data

Session Chair: Sarah Kucharek

Youth theatre programs are, at their core, educational entities, yet, unlike schools, they often lack oversight and requirements for maintaining the safety of the children they work with. This workshop is designed to facilitate discussion regarding prevention needs, strategies, and the findings of a content analysis that examines the nature of abuse in youth theatre communities as reported by over 50 different news articles in an effort to establish the scope of the abuse, thereby illustrating the need for prevention measures, building upon earlier findings that very little to no research exists specifically related to theatre environs. Together, we can make a safer, more positive culture for theatre artists especially children and youth.

Network: Playwriting

I Have A Story: Collaborative Playwriting Between Youth and Adults

Session Chair: John Newman

Other Presenter(s): Jenny Millinger and Julia Hogan Laurenson

"Art" shows exactly how it feels to live in the world right now. That's why you do it, no matter what is happening. Danger Zeiler and Allison Gregory. What does it mean to be a young person living in a moment of historic upheaval? What can generations learn from each other? And in such a moment, how can theatre do what it does best: connect people through the story? Join us for an energizing and inspiring discussion with five intergenerational playwriting teams who collaborated to create plays about the pandemic through the "Have a Story" anthology project: Phoebe Anderson and Tom Arvetis, Braulio Arquilla, and Mabelle Reynoso, Jonah Dean and Gabriel Jason Dean, Sofia Gomez and Ramon Esquivel, Makenzie Greer and Gloria Bond Clunie. Each young person (aged 9-18) responded to a call for personal stories from 2020; they were partnered via Zoom with a TYA playwright who transformed their story into a short play. Their joint work reflects deeply searing experiences of the past year, including the inequitable impact of the pandemic on communities of color, experiences of essential workers, police violence, educational failures, and personal anxieties. This session will explore the collaborative process between the young authors and their partner playwrights. Following a quick playwright slam, the teams will engage in conversation with each other and take questions from the field: How did you establish trust? How did you write and edit together? How did adult playwrights draw upon their own creativity while still centering the voice of the young author? How did writing with someone from a shared cultural, racial, or experiential background impact your storytelling? What do the young authors wish playwrights knew about writing with and for young audiences? This intergenerational writing experiment offers learnings for anyone interested in making plays for or with young people.

Network: College/University

Rehearsing Our Becoming

Session Chair: Juliana Saxton

Other Presenter(s): Carole Miller

Changing societal perceptions of the educational value of our art form is the Sisyphean burden that we have lived with long enough. New research and new language promise new ways of celebrating the arts as central to lifting the curtain on our understanding of the curriculum. Talking and playing within the safety of dramatic fiction offers ways of exploring the big questions about what it means to be human and alive in the world. "It is how we become who we are." (McGilchrist, 2012, p. 249). Yet, schooling still privileges academic knowledge (rational thought) over and above the human contexts in which that knowledge is sought, acquired, integrated, and felt.  Learning in and through our art form is experiential pedagogy. That is to say that we are practicing/rehearsing life through active engagement. Unlike other kinds of knowledge which through external instruction is measurable, accountable, and containable, (Hunter, 2016) experiential learning uses innate capabilities that develop dependent upon what and how students respond to that experience in the moments of its happening. That kind of "knowing" although observable and describable cannot be measured because there is no way for the facilitator to know what elements of the experiential context were in play. For example, a student, after a number of weeks participating in drama where s/he never took off their jacket, does so.  At what point did they become comfortable enough or have enough confidence to remove it?  There are many skills we teach in drama and theatre education capable of measurement, but they are not the ones that teachers promote as important: collaboration, communication, creativity, confidence, and empathy (Goldstein, 2020). We make the case for promoting opportunities for students to rehearse life in all its uncertainties so that they may better deal with the unbounded fluidity of being human.  We do this through theatre, ". . . one of the most powerful and efficacious procedures that human society has developed for the endlessly fascinating process of cultural and personal self-reflexion, experimentation, and understanding." (Carlson, 2018, p. 253)