With city-wide budget cuts, my new Drama 2 class has been left without textbooks, so we're learning through experiences. We are trying to explore theater in our communities and personal lives.
My students have passion and a strong sense of community.
Being the most diverse school in our city--with over 80 different languages spoken in our halls--brings with it a host of differences and conflicts. My Drama 2 students have spent a year together working through those differences and forging a new sense of community: the theater community. My students collaborated to create performance art that transcends race, age, gender, religion, and language and strives to change our community's perception about difference. The next community I want to open their eyes to is the collegiate community. As a school that is made up of mostly refugee students and first generation immigrants, "college" isn't a word they're used to hearing at home. I want them to experience a slice of college through the lens of their comfort zone: theater.
My Project
The NIU Theater Festival is a one-day series of workshops instructed by NIU faculty and MFA students. My students will enroll in four one-hour courses, ranging from set design, to Meisner training, to costuming, to improvisation, to character development. Then, when we return to the classroom, the students will each be responsible for training our class in one of the methods they learned at the festival. They will compile these methods into a bank of strategies to use for their original performance compositions, which will be performed in our school's annual Talent Show.
Without textbooks, we've had to become creative about exploring theater in the real world.
This festival will provide us with a living textbook because the skills learned there will ground our exploration of play production in the classroom.
This project will also give my students the rare opportunity to become experts in the field. They will receive training on a method that no one in the class has experienced and then get the change to teach that method to the class.
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Mrs. Kordik and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.