TETA Board of Directors
President-Elect
Please allow me to welcome everyone back to a great year of educational theatre on all fronts, K-12 and at the college/university campuses! It is my hope that you are geared up, engaging students and truly working to plan and execute a marvelous year of shows and projects for all of our Texas educational thespians.
In some of our district meetings, one of the most critical areas that we have been focusing on is our English / Language Arts / Literature student group. One of the most dramatic (forgive the pun) and interesting pieces of data that we are observing is the correlation between those who are succeeding in middle school and high school English / Literature courses who participate in theatre arts and those who do not. Having just added theatre arts as a middle school elective program, I am very interested to see how this data will process with our 6-8 graders. Although many of us in the educational theatre world are keenly aware of the natural connection between literacy education and theatre arts, many of our English and literature instructors miss out on the phenomenal opportunity to build learning communities alongside us as theatre educators. We bring their selected stories to life on stage. We engage the learner as not only a reader, but as a physical participant and/or audience member in the process of evaluating, researching and examining characters, plots and the dramatic elements that make up quality literature.
I would encourage you (if you are not already doing so) to engage your fellow literature instructors and English department staff to develop some co-curricular activities within your English/Literature and Theatre Arts departments to help increase student participation and understanding in the English base of both courses. Even if this took place in only one literature sample during your year as a collaborative project, imagine the benefits to your English/literature department as your “shared” students were gaining their English foundation alongside the show that you are producing with them. I think that some of our students digest some of the deeper lessons in theatre arts, but sometimes fail to apply the simple connection to the ELA side.
Our theatre students learn a great deal regarding the theories behind motivation, action and reaction within characters, as well as the choices that they have to make taking on those characters. Utilizing a learning community alongside and English/literature teacher that focuses on verb use, vocabulary analysis and discussion can not only strengthen your performer’s knowledge and interpretation of the script, but will also help them polish up on those tricky sentence structures and terms when they are reviewing their English projects and creative writing assignments. Many have already incorporated this approach into their peer cooperative style, but if you haven’t, it can open up doors for both departments – and perhaps even intrigue those English students you’ve been encouraging to audition for years!