One sticky summer morning in Vermont, I entered the barn where a professional actress from a popular New England theater company would be teaching a course entitled Using Theater in an English Classroom. The premise of the class was that the content of a traditional literacy course could be taught through the vehicle of theater and that the practices used to prepare actors for performance could be applied to making English instruction more hands-on, engaging, and memorable. The first instruction we were given was to abandon our desks. We could not, the teaching artist insisted, expect our students to do things that we were not willing to do ourselves. We would not be spending the next six weeks taking notes or engaging theoretically, but working through the literature and performance process in a way that we could mirror with our students. The final exam for the course would involve staging a theatrical production as well as developing a curricular unit. As someone with no background in the performing arts, who had heard of experiential learning pedagogical models but had no idea how to deploy one in an Advanced Placement English course, I came to understand that theater was literature on its feet.

In Horace’s Compromise, Sizer (1984) asserts that among the incentives which draw adolescents to school, the “most powerful is tradition: one goes to high school because that is what one does from the age of fourteen to seventeen” (p. 59). It is saddening to think that attending school is so frequently perceived as a default position, similar to the way that many adults pessimistically view their presence at their job. Despite the fact that we spend most of our young lives in school and adult lives at work, these realms are quite often envisioned as separate from the spaces of the things we are passionate about. They are too often places for checking boxes, not for doing the things that bring us joy. Incredible learning opportunities are the ones that assist you in developing and fulfilling dreams and potential that you never knew you had. I can think of two instances—one in school and one in the workplace—where I was genuinely moved by my learning because I had the chance to apply it, to see myself becoming more efficacious in real time.

This is the kind of learning environment that I wish to cultivate and be a part of as both an educator and a learner. When I think about the investment needed to create buy-in around a project or organization, I consider the passion and care that drives a neighborhood to invest in a community theater. Community theaters are run on both individual and collective commitment. Most of the players in the space—from actors to ushers, stage managers to costume designers, set builders to board members—operate on a volunteer basis. Furthermore, these companies are capable of mounting incredible productions while operating under as many, if not more constraints in terms of time, space, money, and human capital than schools do. The productions are a labor of love for all involved and the theaters themselves are often beloved fixtures in their neighborhood. They become sources of energy and creativity in areas sometimes apart from thriving city centers and professional art scenes. I envision a school that provides something similar for its community—a space for inspiration and innovation that everyone can engage with, invest in, and be proud of.

The Globe School is designed as an independent micro middle school that would open with twenty-five students and be capped at one hundred. Democratic educational experiences rely on the ability of a program to meet the individual needs of its students, and while there is scale potential for a model like this, for quality purposes it would be critical to keep the community small at the outset. The school is not an arts academy or a school of drama, rather a program which utilizes the vehicle of a theatrical production to blend traditional pedagogy in the realm of advanced academics and arts education, community school practices, project-based learning, and narrative curriculum design to provide a unifying context for the entire academic experience. Theater is a vehicle for creating rigorous, integrative curricular experiences that allow students to apply their learning to real-world tasks and critically engage with the world around them, increasing engagement, comprehension, and retention.

Schools are not capable of generating rich learning experiences just by existing. The educational environment I have in mind is rooted in the theatrical concept of a production; rather, of producing—learning how to learn in the process of putting something together. The model put forth in this chapter is one in which student learning is centered around putting on performances. In this domain, lessons are designed in the context of the plays themselves—for example, studying the history of the place and time in which the production will be set, engaging with mathematics through drawing up production budgets, creating art through the design and construction of sets, studying literature by examining characterization for performance, revolving science experiments around the production of special effects, and so on. I envision an environment in which learning is woven seamlessly with living and the student body operates as a legitimate company.

This model is designed with the intention of building effective measures of student learning and does not aim to eradicate all traditional metrics or expectations for what a school is supposed to do. It does, however, propose changing the venue. Arts have historically been employed in incredibly effective ways, not merely to supplement, but to teach core content. Strategies for using theater in the classroom have the capability to serve in both a remediation and an advancement capacity simultaneously. The experience of acting for my own English students was the experience of living and breathing literature, and engagement with my colleagues in other disciplines evidenced how other content areas might be similarly engaged. In such an exploratory, dynamic space, students are engaged in a constant cycle of discovery and learning.

One challenge in promoting such a model is divesting people of the idea that you need to be “artsy” or a “theater kid” to benefit from it. The closest thing I have experienced to interviews in my professional career is an audition. Producing a play was some of the hardest logistical and organizational work I have ever done, and it requires the kind of critical thinking and problem-solving ability that no traditional math problem ever came close to demanding. Stage management and directing have leadership built into the job titles, and all of the most important close reading and composition techniques can be taught through table work, character development, script writing, and the creation of promotional materials. Because this school model has a service imperative built into its design, students would engage with the community to promote their work and the school as an access site for affordable art. By the time students get to their final stretch at the school, the aim is to have them generate original plays and run all of the production logistics themselves.

Ultimately, this proposal focuses on linking learning with both labor (production) and enjoyment (play). People are most successful when they are doing the things they love. It is through the pursuit of our passions that we carve out our place in the world. When students enter a grade level “behind,” the instinct in the sector is to continuously expose them to “back-to-basics” techniques that often fail to inspire great advancements in learning or make them competitive with peers that are operating in far less restrictive spaces which promote creativity and self-direction. The Globe School prioritizes creating authentic learning experiences for students which meet both traditional academic standards and the demands of a modern workplace that requires creativity and a well-defined sense of self to adequately navigate.

Curricular Framework

Each unit would be constructed around a production that the students would ultimately perform for the community. Initially, a teaching team with diverse experience in discrete content, theater arts, and curriculum planning would develop the units. The expectation is that students would progress to the point where they could write their own pieces for performance, design their own units around these pieces, and direct younger students through all components of production. The school would produce four plays in a year and students would be assigned one of four teams—the production team, the company, the technical crew, and the business team—for each performance. Over the course of the academic year, every student would have worked on each team.

To illustrate this idea, consider a unit designed around Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. In its time, the play was highly controversial, and for this production, all the students would attend contextual seminars. That is, specialists—possibly from the design team, but preferably local university professors or historians—would teach them about McCarthyism and blacklisting. Where possible, the school would engage the world as an extension of the classroom, perhaps with a trip to Salem, so that students could learn in a more impactful context than a lecture hall.

Production

Students on the production team would be responsible for developing the vision for the play. This team consists of the students directing, producing, stage managing, and devising the vision for the set and costumes. They might begin by undergoing a book study in which they ultimately move past the plot and contextual information into a discussion of the play’s major themes. What kinds of social and political circumstances led to both the witch trials and the McCarthy hearings? Are there situations in modern times when fear and paranoia drive people to break the rules of a democratic society? A critical component of the preparation and work of all teams would be engaging community members in relevant fields wherever possible.

The school might invite someone who works on devising concepts for movies or plays to help the team decide on the angle they want to pursue for the show. The students could choose to explore multiple themes for the production or hone in one—perhaps the marginalization of certain groups in society. The design team could engage additional professionals throughout this discovery process, such as a lawyer to discuss due process and why the burden of proof is supposed to be on the court and not defendants. Discussions might also be crafted to explore morality questions (enter a philosophy professor) around “doing the right thing” and what choices the students themselves might make if their careers or lives were on the line.

The Company

Being on the company side of the performance would involve immersive acting training more like a standard theater course. Ensemble building activities and theater games might be standard fare within the school, but students focusing on performing in the unit’s production would experience the most of this kind of exercise. The type of script study required for performance requires engaging with the close reading practices that are the backbone of literature classes but involves approaching literacy in a kinesthetic way. In addition to actual performance and elocution training, these students would do in-depth character analyzes and empathy training, considering (in conjunction with the director) which of the many angles on their character they might want to take and writing reflections that provide a rationale for their preferred interpretations.

Another aim would be to expose students to as much theater as possible in this stage—perhaps reading plays across genres and attending performances of them. The design does not take for granted that the students will have any, let alone extensive, theater training. Their time in the company would also prompt students to consider how the work they are doing as actors might serve their future career—interviewing, pitching, collaborating, etc. Students in the company might also be exposed to the kinds of learning business students engage with in organizational behavior classes as being in a cast is the ultimate team experience. After each performance, the cast and production team might engage in a talk-back where they answered community members’ questions about what they learned in the process of making the show, developing their character, etc.

Tech

If the semester a student spends on the production and company side of performances are slightly more literature and history heavy, their experience on the tech and business teams might tend a bit more toward the content of traditional math and science courses. This is why one student would travel between all four teams over the course of a year—to make for a comprehensive experience overall. Students might engage with local designers, sewing experts, hairdressers, and make-up artists as part of the process of devising what hair, make-up, and clothing would look like in the chosen time period of the production. Local architects and construction experts could be engaged as well as set designers to teach lessons on the mathematics involved in designing and building. Students working on this team would need to familiarize themselves with the vision of the production team and collaborate with them in order to design a set that embodies the focal themes.

They would also be part of the building process and might engage with lighting experts, painters, musicians, and sound techs throughout the process of determining the setting, lighting, and music. The act of generating a world for the stage also requires empathy work. The crew, in conjunction with the actors, could conduct interviews with individuals who were alive during the Red Scare or survey the community to find out how people feel they would respond to a difficult choice between the more noble course of action and their own well-being. Additionally, interesting science labs could be developed around the process of generating special effects for the production.

Business

Work on the business team might begin with budgeting. What resources are necessary to make the production work? Where are the funds coming from? Financial planners could speak to the students about how to build and manage a budget, or the school might invite local business owners to share their budgeting practices with students. Another primary function of this team would be promoting the performance—e.g. coordinating with store owners for the actors to do a pop-up scene in front of a popular shop to get people’s attention, developing multimedia advertising campaigns. The productions would be inexpensive (if not entirely free) to the community, but this team might develop a program in which they sell advertising space to local companies.

The business team would also be responsible for marketing materials—production photos, headshots, helping the actors develop acting resumes—all things which, of course, they would first be trained in themselves. They might also be responsible for writing newspaper and online articles about the shows and managing the school’s social media platforms. These students might have lessons in accounting, economics, and marketing with the ultimate responsibility for understanding the school’s finances well enough to determine relevant budgets for the season.

The goal is to arrive at a place where older students work with the design team to develop curriculum, ultimately getting to a point where they are working through the challenges of running a small business on their own as the adults observe, facilitate, serve, and support as needed. How incredible would it be if community teachers and the design team ultimately became a plus, but not necessary because the more experienced students could teach the younger students the basics of putting on a meaningful performance and how to find the information that they do not already know. This school will be built on an empathy narrative but would empower students to decide with their unit design how that plays out—how they teach and learn with and within the community they are a part of.

Assessment

The performance review model of the school would require students on each team to sit down with their advisor in advance of every unit and set goals according to which team they have been assigned to. Because the school will initially house so few students, it is part of the advisors’ job to really know the students’ schedules and what the expectations are for them from the various instructors they engage with in each unit. In addition to debriefing the production overall, advisors would go through individual student’s contributions to the production and the various ways in which the final product was dependent on them to be successful. Working on teams is often quite a motivating factor for students. It is one thing to receive an incomplete on a paper that only affects your grade, quite another to choose to skip an assignment that has implications for a larger group.

Additionally, there is learning in the process of understanding that meaningful work contributes to a context larger than oneself. This is a model that really battles “busy work.” If what you are working on does not serve the production in some capacity, you probably should not be doing it. Assessment of a student in the company would look rather different than assessing a student on the tech team. For the unit on The Crucible, a student in the company might be evaluated on research they have conducted around the Salem trials and McCarthyism, artifacts (possibly write-ups) which reflect character analysis, video footage from different nights of the performance or from the beginning to the end of the rehearsal process to see how their elocution, empathetic portrayal, etc. has improved over the course of the project.

They might further be assessed on joint work with the production team who developed the concept for the production and on how effectively they engaged with the rest of the company as a team player. For their part, the production team might be assessed on, in addition to the research they do around creative interpretation, their organizational and management capacities. These latter qualities do not frequently show up on standardized tests, but they are integral to success in the workplace and if a student is to successfully and autonomously navigate a university setting. Such a model has the potential to prepare students not only to read and write better but also to become stronger leaders and take greater responsibility for their own learning.

Tech team projects could be less abstract—did you do the math or chemistry correctly in order to construct this set or generate such and such special effects, etc.—but not necessarily. Perhaps they spend the unit cycle additionally engaged in studying aesthetics or psychology and considering how costume designs and the set will impact the audience emotionally. From there they might engage in a presentation or talk-back with the community after one of the performances around what they have learned and why they made the choices that they made. Through this process they would be assessed on the quality of their research, the application of that research, presentation skills, and how responsive they can be to questions based on the depth of their knowledge.

Similarly, for every concrete task the business team can be assessed on—their budget, their advertisements—there are so many other less concrete things that could be evaluated. Perhaps one student on the marketing team has set a goal with her advisor that she wants to develop greater tech literacy. One of the projects she might be assigned and assessed on is creating a video trailer for the performance that will be published on the school’s website for marketing purposes. Perhaps another tells his advisor that he wants to be in charge of arranging the logistics around a promotional event. He could be assessed based on local participation in and response to the event as well as how organized he was in pulling it together from an operational capacity.

One way in which theater is a good vehicle for an academic unit is that there is a built-in assessment at the end—the production itself. From the standpoint of investment, I have found that when I employed theater even on a small scale in my English classroom, the plays were interesting motivational tools, even for the students who were initially skeptical. Note that these students, unlike those who would presumably attend The Globe School, had not opted into the theater experience in signing up for my course. But when I told them that a pop-up performance was going to be performed for freshmen, my senior classes invested more readily. Suddenly, an assignment with very few parameters yielded incredible props, elaborate costumes, innovative character interpretations, and choreographed dance numbers.

This is to say that if we are designing run-of-the-mill assessments because that is what we feel we need to police learning or ensure that students will invest in rigorous work, it is a poor excuse. There are much more engaging and creative ways of generating buy-in—whether it is by building peer approval into the outcome (quite resonant in the teen experience and at play in the situation above) or engendering a true passion for the activity. Standardized testing is an assessment model that allows for the evaluation of many individuals in an efficient way. The production as an output is a much more nuanced assessment.

In Mehta’s (2014) article on deeper learning, he uses theater as an example although he looks at it from a different perspective than outlined here. He thought about how theater programs operate like apprenticeships for a craft that exists in the real world and described how core subjects often fail to make their practice similarly relevant. With this model, I propose that theater might serve as a vehicle for making all subjects relevant. At the end of the day, a school is only going to be able to teach students a finite number of things. They might as well be things students really want to learn. Otherwise, with the exception of a relatively random smattering, students five or ten years down the line probably will not remember most of what they were taught. The Globe School seeks to generate a learning experience that is impossible to forget.