ALT/space

Has slavery ended?

That was the opening question for the most recent unit of inquiry in the middle school Humanities department at my school, the American International School in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Over lunch one day I had a conversation with the grade eight humanities teacher about his Modern Day Slavery unit.  It was a topic that was bigger then he had imagined and he felt that the way the students demonstrate their understanding needed to go beyond a simple report or a PowerPoint, Prezi, Keynote or any number of other common presentation tools.

My colleague introduced the question at the end of last year to segue between the topic of legal slavery in the U.S. and the modern era of slavery.  He could have ended his study of slavery with the Emancipation Proclamation, as is often the case, but living in Dhaka, Bangladesh, he knew that the answer was much more complex. This year he wanted to go further, but he was struggling with exactly how.

I’m the theater teacher and have a background in developing drama units across the curriculum so I asked, “What if?”  What if instead of a poster or a PowerPoint, students devised a theater piece to demonstrate that they understood modern day slavery? 

There was silence for a moment.

I had been down this road before.  Arts integration is a fantastic idea as long as it doesn’t require any more work and doesn’t disrupt the pacing of the core curriculum.  More than once I was told that a class didn’t need any more drama, because they had already done skits.

“You mean like put on a play?” he asked.

“Well, not exactly a play like you might be thinking of, but something theatrical.”

Up to this point in my career I had incorporated drama into a variety of classes and situations; usually the topics were more academic or meant to enrich the experience, but I had never worked on a piece with so serious a topic.

“So how would that work?” my would-be-collaborator asked.

Having been here for just over a year I was surprised to find that there wasn’t a history of arts integration using the arts specialists to take the lead.

“I’m not sure.  But I have some ideas.”

I went back to the magic “if”: What if they took the research that they were gathering in humanities and brought it to drama class?  What if I came into his classroom and co-taught a few lessons with him? What if we could get the students to devise a piece of theater that would not only incorporate what they learned about modern day slavery but also support our school mission of working towards a “just and sustainable society”? What if I could tie it together with Augusto Boal, Frantic Assembly, Living Theater, and other techniques of theater creation? What if….?

There was another pause.  I had probably said too much.  Was too eager.

“You would have to lead that.  I’ve done skits before, but not like what you’re talking about.”

“Are you interested in trying to make it work?”

“Do you think the kids would go for it?”

Here was an opportunity, an opening. This might be a collaborator who could put aside ego, I thought, someone who is willing to accept ambiguity and step outside of his expertise, who is ready to work as an equal in the classroom. Finding the right collaborator takes time but when you find the right one the possibilities are endless.

And that lunch conversation is how the Grade 8 Humanities and Drama departments embarked on a multi-week experiment: melding traditional humanities topics and research methods with experimental, movement-based, devised, social justice theater. At the start we had no idea what we would end up with, but I knew I had a collaborator who was willing give it a try.

Jeff Redman is the middle school drama teacher at American International School Dhaka, Bangladesh. He founded the Ivey Award winning Workhouse Theatre Company in Minneapolis where he served as Artistic Director for six years. Jeff leads workshops for educators and was invited to present his workshop, Injecting Drama! at the NESA conference in Athens, Greece. He holds a B.S in Theater and M.A. in teaching.  Jeff is currently working on connecting ex-pat students to local Bangladeshi artists.

My work with at risk youth began because I needed a job. I went in spite of being afraid and, over the course of the next three years, I met some of the most creative souls I’ve ever known. I even still have copies of the music they created. No, none of it is great by music industry standards, but I watched those boys struggle to recognize notes on a keyboard, to actually write out their thoughts on paper so they could record them as rap songs later, and to control their urges to strike out at others so that they would be allowed to come to my class and I hoped I could live up to their expectations.

I too was struggling in those classes. I had NO idea what I was really doing. Wasn’t it Sesame Street that had the little game “One of these things is not like the other”? I kept playing my version of it and thinking which of these things didn’t belong: juvenile jail, opera, teaching artist or all of the above? I struggled with frustration, fear, and doubts. I struggled to understand the slang that was an entirely different language from the English I spoke. I had to learn fast because they would try to insert gang related things in their raps. They would ask me about the music business and how to get a record deal. I had to tell them that I didn’t know but that I would try to find out. I shared with them my own journey in trying to find out the answers for them. I had to call friends and spend time in the library. I read articles and books on the hip hop industry so that I could give them a list of resources. One day we even took time to figure out exactly how rappers make their money and it’s not from the record sales.

Collaboration skills were nonexistent. I had to remind them over and over that they didn’t have be friends with everyone in their work groups. They simply had to find common ground in order to create this music. I spoke bluntly about my expectations for their behavior and boundaries. Actually, I told them that I knew they had to take their meds but they didn’t know if I’d taken mine that day so they should play nice. That sounds awful doesn’t it? Perhaps it was but these young men were in for serious crimes: assault, assault with a deadly weapon, rape of a 4 year old child, grand theft auto - stolen police car, etc. I couldn’t afford to show anything but truth to them. These teens were not the same people that I worked with in “normal” classrooms around the country. There were armed guards at ALL times in each class yet I never had any physical incidents within my classroom. As a matter of fact, the boys themselves made sure that there were no physical issues in the classroom. They would remind others of the rules that I’d stated on the first day and at least one time I know that there was a fight immediately after they left my classroom.

My heart bled for them and they taught me so much about loving the seemingly unloveable. I worried though that what I was able to give them wasn’t enough, would never be enough. One day, weeks into a particular residency, I saw a young gang leader, notorious in the city of Louisville, stand side by side with a young man from the mountains who couldn’t read, write or barely speak intelligibly, and help him record a “song” by writing down what he wanted to say and whispering the words to him line by line for him to repeat as I recorded his efforts. That day I saw the arts cross cultural and racial barriers, spit in the face of peer pressure and give voice to those from whom silence had been demanded and I knew that whatever I was doing was actually reaching them. I remember these young men and I smile.

It is my experience with these young men that kinesthetically shaped how I learn from my students and how I teach them. I learned that truth is the only defense I have in the face of a student’s fears. I learned that if I share who I am, they will not only share who they are but they will believe me when I tell them they have much to offer and that there are better ways to interact with the world. I learned that I could share my love of opera and they may not like it, but they could respect my love of it because I took time to share it with them. I haven’t worked with this extreme group of at risk youth in a long time but I try to use the most important lesson that they taught me every single day. What is that lesson you ask? It is simply this. The very act of sincerely, not superficially, attempting to find common ground with my students, lays a foundation of trust upon which I can build a successful residency no matter the age or demographics.

Allison Upshaw is also known as “MzOpera”, and for the last 13 years she’s worked as a Performing Arts Integration Consultant/ Teaching Artist in AL, AR, GA, TN and SC. Her background includes two degrees in Voice Performance from Oberlin Conservatory and Louisiana State University, a union card from the Actor’s Equity Association, years of studying African influenced dance, and a stint as a college instructor of voice and acting. Allison provides residencies, workshops and professional development in arts integration. In 2012, she had the privilege of being selected to present at the 1st International Teaching Artist Conference in Oslo, Norway.

I’ve been a teaching artist since 1999. I’ve taught performance poetry and theatre in classrooms, camps, one-off workshops and residencies, and teacher professional development workshops. I’ve judged competitions, coached youth teams, facilitated at conferences, created, collaborated, and toured. I worked in the education department of a large performing arts center, taught college as an adjunct, and led workshops as a freelance teaching artist to any school that would have me. Teaching Artist has been my identity for fourteen years while I waited tables, wrote graduate school papers, scraped rent together, practiced marketing myself, created websites for my work, and kept my car healthy for state-wide treks to schools. I’ve been piecing my living together for 14 years. On the eve of age 40, I’m tired

I love my work and I would love some stability. So when I saw that the youth advocacy organization that I volunteer with was hiring an education director, I decided it was my dream job.  I would be leading workshops on bullying prevention and social justice in schools, creating curriculum, and working with marginalized youth. Yes, please.

The position was not arts-specific. In fact, this organization did not have the word “arts” anywhere in its mission statement. But I work with school administrators, teachers, and youth in third through twelfth grades, teaching them creative ways to approach core curricula and social skills. I started my own theatre project for bullying prevention, conflict resolution, and social justice.  My graduate thesis explored participatory theatre for bullying prevention and specific state mandates for schools’ approaches to bullying. I know this stuff.

Being a freelance, professional teaching artist means I am Lead Artist, Educator, Program Director, Director of Education and Community Outreach, Director of Marketing and Publicity, and Development Director.  I take workshops for continual professional development. I meet with colleagues in my field to discuss best practices in Educational Theatre and Applied Theatre. I design programming based on state educational standards to meet essential objectives, and my workshops enhance social skills. I am a skilled improviser; I read the needs of my classroom audience and alter my teaching style accordingly. I harness the power of theatre and poetry to build community and change a school’s climate for the better. I consistently receive positive feedback from teachers, students, and principals.

So although this Director of Education position did not specifically require an arts integration skillset, I felt my expertise would be an asset. I couldn’t think of anyone in the area more qualified for this position than me. So I submitted my cover letter and resume, and waited.

I began to dream about the job. What would it mean for my identity as a teaching artist if I no longer used the arts to teach? It would be a relief, I decided. This job would be reliable, consistent, full-time - with benefits! - and I would go to an office when I wasn’t on the road. I could continue to do work I believed in, but would not have to freelance. It felt exactly perfect. I prepared to leave my teaching artist identity behind.

I made it to the second interview, as one of the top two candidates for the position. It is difficult to explain the intricacies of teaching artistry to those unfamiliar with the work.  One of the interview questions I was asked by the hiring committee referred to my approachability with both middle and high school students.

That’s what I do for a living, I thought. I meet each group of students where they are and earn their buy-in by creating a safe space for them to take creative risks.

Another question required me to discuss a workplace conflict I experienced, and how I handled it. As I racked my brain thinking of a workplace conflict in my professional life, I realized I never worked in a traditional workplace. I talked about one of my college students who used various tactics to railroad a class ice-breaker that clearly pushed his buttons, and the methods I used to work through the conflict. I thought the interview went well. But throughout the interview, in the back of my mind, I worried that my fourteen years as a teaching artist may be no match for another candidate vying for this position who has traditional work experience.

I didn’t get the job. I know the person who did land the Director of Education position, and this person will be great for the organization. Still, I wish it were me. I could (and have, and will continue to) apply for full-time arts and social justice education positions in Boston or New York, but I love my Vermont community and I want to stay here. The catch-22 is that there aren’t many jobs for my skillset where I live, and the current economy means that I am competing for grants with dozens of other non-profits.

Theatre and performance poetry teaching artist seeks full-time employment in the education department of a social justice organization working with marginalized populations. I love my identity as a teaching artist, but I wonder where I fit. Do my skills transfer to any full-time job out there? Or am I destined to piece it together in lieu of returning to school to acquire more degrees – teaching certification, PhD, something? On my less optimistic days, I want to exorcise my entrepreneurial spirit. Teaching artistry requires multiple, marketable, real-world skills, but what else are they good for in real-world employment?

As I finished a session with a class of second-graders today, I asked them to identify their favorite moments from class.  Amongst the ‘everything!’ answers and those noting the joy of being unusually physically involved during a lesson, one girl said, ‘Being the Christmas present.’ It’s true.  I bestowed upon her the title of Christmas present for a brief moment as the students were forming themselves into groups. I note that, in that brief moment, all eyes were on her and she held the greatest power in the room. Then she made a choice, the session continued and the moment forgotten until she mentioned it again at the session’s conclusion.

The moment came about when I tasked the students with creating groups of their own choice, bound only by the number to be included.  The students bustled about, as expected, choosing and re-choosing potential group mates until just the single girl stood alone.  I called her over to me, saying, ‘Look what I found. Look what I found!  A Christmas Present. Which group would like a present?’ Hands in every group shot up. The girl smiled and chose the group she wanted to join.

Such a small moment, such a simple task, the question might be why put so much energy and focus on it?  Why not simply assign her a group and move on?  I am the product of last choice sports teams.  All throughout high school I suffered the indignity of being last choice when teams were chosen. And generally it was very public, as the team captains slowly chose one team member at a time, until I stood there alone, last, undesirable choice. I was generally told to just toughen up and learn to get over it.  And I always wondered why should I have to?

So I have experimented endlessly, and continue to do so, to find as many ways to guide students to create and choose groups that support varied interaction, giving power to the oft powerless and finding ways to turn the dynamics, so that those who might have once stood vulnerable and deflated, suddenly become the most powerful and desired in the room.

More than just momentary power and good feeling, these tiny events contribute to positive, support working relationships in the room.  Trying to avoid telling the students how to treat each other, I offer models for how we honor each individual and their potential contributions.  In addition to the answer, ‘being the Christmas present,’ I have regularly heard from older students such answers as, ‘I got to meet more people in the class’ and ‘I liked working with the kids in class I never worked with.’

Christmas is a time for good feelings. I keep wondering, why not bring that to class every day?

I recently taught a workshop on Dramatic Improvisation for a Comedy Festival focused on Improvisation and Stand-Up comedy for adults. Mine was the first workshop of the day (a Saturday), and I had anticipated a small turnout of people, mostly men, who might resist all but the hilarious and shallow. Why? Because Dramatic Improvisation only works with deep vulnerability and an almost intimate relationship with a scene partner, who may be a stranger. It’s hard to do, and if the commitment to the scene partner is not complete, the scene is unsatisfying. It’s also not necessarily funny (although it can be), and has the potential to be beautiful and raw. Kinda doesn’t fit Saturday Improv Comedy Fest, but that’s what I was asked to teach.

Well, it’s true that people dribbled in and it’s true that they were men with one late exception, BUT they were receptive, worked hard, took direction, and did some poignant, funny, breath-stopping work that was character-driven rather than joke-driven. They took direction and critique and grew in awareness and, yes, intimacy.

I have given this outcome and my own prejudice a great deal of thought in the days since. I typically teach Dramatic Improv and Contact Improv (another deeply personal and wonderful improv form that is movement based) to teenagers, and the hard part is always inching them towards the letting go of their outer walls, helping them to launch themselves into a moment where they are vulnerable co-stewards of an intimacy of emotion and raw honesty made public.

To be clear, I don’t mean ‘intimacy’ in the sense of sexuality or sex scenes. In Contact Improv, the intimacy is both physical and emotional; students’ bodies stay in contact as they discover and apply what are, in essence, planetary and geographical physics. They must learn to not be self-supporting, but rather co-steward as they move through poses hunting for balance, center-point, centripetal force of the unit which invariably puts them as individuals in a place where they would fall if they let go or tried to use brute force instead of trust, vulnerability, and connectivity.

There is always huge fear, huge resistance, and then unfettered and profound joy when they nail it. I often take as my partner the largest or least physical comfortable person—I am not very big—in order to demonstrate that it will be okay. I will have the large young man do the pose with me where he ends up standing on my knees as we both lean back, his arm extended, like flying …. because relationships are not about who is stronger, who is bigger, who has what qualities as an individual, but rather how those qualities can be used to find the balance, the center-point, the connected but turning planets, the tectonic forces of people. After this body work, we do an exercise where each person slowly and carefully touches the air about an inch from their partner’s body (with the back of their hand, not the front) in slow consciousness and respect. Then we do scene work.

Although the process of inching teens towards intimacy, vulnerability, and co-stewardship is different when I teach Dramatic Improv (different exercises), the outcome is the same—surprise, elation, pride, bravery, and an enriched capacity for calm and courageous openness. It’s that trusting co-caring that relies on the relationship and not the self; it is intimacy. Inevitably the scene work is extraordinary, regardless if they ever met their scene partner before, regardless if their scene partner is someone they would even like under other circumstances. Inevitably the performers carry forward a heightened awareness of other and interpersonal bonds, and the realization that they can create something truly incredible through this practice…onstage AND in life.

Why was I surprised by my group of adults? Because for teens, the resistance grows of the newness of true co-caring and the ‘terrifyingness’ of such intense vulnerability, and I had presumed that most people who do Stand-Up or joke-type comic improv would be focused on the self rather than the other. Yet in the workshop, they moved more quickly through the steps of deepening vulnerability and emotional intimacy than the teens. Why? Oftentimes, dealing with other targeted performance skills, adults are less willing to take risks than teens. I wonder if, perhaps, the value and impact of a vulnerable, co-stewarding practice was so great in their past (on stage? In real life? In actual relationships?) that they were able, in 50 minutes with people they had never met, practice the art of intimacy and create fabulously engaging Improvisation.

Regardless of the underlying reason, it was an incredible experience for me to work with them and have my assumptions turned upside down, and I will carry this learning forward with me to other times when I am teaching intimacy in performance practice—as something to be mindful of in the workshop participants’ relationships to the material and with each other …. but also in my relationships with them.

Artistic Director of Shearwater Productions, Holly Adams is a long time mask maker, stage combat choreographer, and performer with a focus on physical theatre styles. Holly also loves being a teaching artist! Whether she is giving a master class in NYC or at a college, or creating arts-a-the-core inquiry based curricula for elementary and high schools, she is loving every minute of it. She is the recipient of ATA’s Teaching Artist Service to the Field award for 2009-2010,a member of APA, Ed Bloggers, and a board member for NYSTEA. An interview with Holly is here

Also in ALT/space by Holly Adams:
Working with Children on the Asperger-Autism Spectrum
Rigor and Joy
Don’t Stop Believing