Can critical questions and complicated conversations addressing issues of representation, difference, and witnessing be positioned at the centre of a TYA curriculum? This article examines contemporary, issue-based and culturally specific TYA scripts. In addition, a collection of aesthetic representations are offered as dynamic prompts to help…

This paper follows the author's trajectory as he collaboratively experimented with ethnodrama (theatre scripts generated from interviews, media artifacts, and written media) and devised theatre performance (theatre collaboratively created with a group), culminating in the analysis of a performance with high school students combining elements of…

Before COVID, the author had led in-person readers theatre residencies with the same four fourth-grade teachers and their large public-school classes for over a decade. During COVID, the teachers wanted to do an online residency. The challenge: how to create theatre with young learners in isolated rooms, sitting alone, and seeing others only on a…

This article shares key steps in how to negotiate writing Readers Theatre scripts with English learners or any small group of students. The author aims to help promote language and literacy development and encourage critical thinking and engagement through the powerful modality of Readers Theatre.

Reader's Theater is a transformative and influential instructional tool for reading with far-reaching benefits for all students. Teachers are critical players in the use of Readers Theater in classroom; the effects of Reader's Theater are a direct result of a teacher's involvement. These effects include an increase in word recognition, fluency,…

The authors illustrate how applied theater practices were used in media literacy classes to educate students about acts of religious discrimination in their societies. These practices helped students acknowledge their role in reifying or dismantling these prejudices in and through their classroom interactions with their peers from other religions…

The article describes a collaborative project co-taught by a creative writing teacher and the theater department's technical director that required students to write an original script and perform it as toy theater or shadow theater.

This paper presents an abbreviated version of a verbatim script developed from oral history interviews with individuals key to the development of counselling and psychotherapy in Scotland from 1960 to 2000. Earlier versions were used in workshops with counsellors and pastoral care practitioners to share counter-narratives of counselling and to…

When the lights come up on College of Menominee Nation's theater productions they illuminate the stories that students want to tell. These stories have traveled from the campfires, to classrooms, and then to the stage. They are original in execution but build on a long tradition of Indigenous storytelling. The stories are specific to the students,…

Teaching artists know that many of the children they teach are being deprived of essential human experiences. Poverty, violence, and ineffective education have left them with little hope of emotional or material success, and a student's connection to an artist can change his or her life in little and big ways. Paula Davidoff and Carolyn Hunt are…

This article describes a feminist intervention to raise awareness about, and problematize, the pervasive experience of silencing, as reported by women, people of color, students, people identifying as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer (GLBTQ), people with national origins outside of North America, and people with disabilities, within…

Advocacy begins with an assumption that if a number of community members are suffering, then there must be something wrong, not with the individual members, but with the community as a whole; therefore, the community must be changed to help alleviate that suffering. Advocacy creates a platform for change by allowing individuals to begin the…

In its simplest sense, readers theater is the presentation of written work in a dramatic format. The fundamental difference between readers theater and traditional theater is that performers read their lines. With readers theater there's no memorization, and usually there are no sets or costumes. There's also little or no stage movement. It's…

Reader's theater is an activity in which students, while reading directly from scripts, are able to tell a story in its most entertaining form. Typically, teachers create or purchase premade scripts of stories, and students focus on reading those scripts in a fluent and expressive manner. However, in the lesson presented here, students turn the…

What do actors have in common with bigots, bullies and their victims? They play the same script over and over. This article discusses how social justice theater can teach students to take the story into their own hands. It describes Forum Theater, a dramatic method that sets up tightly scripted dramas of power and difference, then encourages the…