Often a department of one, drama teachers must work proactively to find support networks and community resources that enable them to provide the best education possible.
In late spring, 2006, I was faced with a quandary: How do you teach drama? I had just been assigned my first drama classes at North Hollywood High School, where I’d been teaching for two years, and although I had many thoughts about shows I might direct that would be a good fit for our student population, I had no idea what to include in day-to-day classroom curriculum.
This conundrum was unfortunately not new to me. I had just earned my teacher certification in the state of California as an English teacher through LAUSD’s District Intern Program. Never mind that I had never taken an English class in college — I passed the state exam for English language arts and that was sufficient for entry to the program. As a result, I leaned heavily on the expertise of teachers in the English department at North Hollywood for guidance on what to teach. I asked those colleagues what they were teaching to get insight into what materials and activities were successful with our students. However, when it came to drama, I’d be on my own. Although elements of drama pedagogy were incorporated into various graduate courses I’d taken while a student in NYU Steinhardt’s Program in Educational Theatre, I lacked a scaffolded approach to learning how to create a curriculum and no set community of drama teachers to turn to for support.
Just as I had experienced in the English department at North Hollywood, most teachers have the luxury of working with colleagues who teach the same content. Consider the math department, the social studies department, or the science department. But how many schools have a drama department? Some lucky few might find themselves within an arts department, but how similar are visual art teaching, music teaching, dance teaching, and drama teaching? Consequently, it is incumbent upon drama teachers to get out of the isolation of being a department-of-one and find a support network of trusted peers to whom they can turn when faced with the all-too-common question: “What now?”
Community support for drama and theater teachers
Professional organizations like the American Alliance for Theatre and Education (AATE) and the Educational Theatre Association (EDTA) host annual conferences that provide theater educators with needed professional development and networking which are necessary resources for supporting classroom teachers. However, membership in these organizations is not free, and registration and travel to attend these annual conferences requires investment from school and district leadership to support teachers in their professional development.
The support drama teachers get from these organizations is essential at this political moment. In the press, a lot of attention is given to book banning across the country, but less so to censorship and restrictions in the arts. For the last five years, Qui Nguyen’s play “She Kills Monsters” regularly appears in EDTA’s annual survey of the top ten plays performed in schools, and yet the work has been met with calls for censorship and cancellation due to the play’s content. Other popular plays have faced a similar fate — be it Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun,” Moisés Kaufman and members of Tectonic Theatre Project’s “The Laramie Project,” Bert V. Royal’s “Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead,” or even works by William Shakespeare.
Through partnership with organizations like AATE and EDTA, teachers learn about initiatives to actively oppose efforts to restrict the arts, such as the No Book Bans Coalition, which advocates against theater bans; Dramatists Guild Legal Defense Fund, which has published “Dramatic Changes: A Toolkit for Producing Stage Works on College Campuses in Turbulent Times,” and provide legal support for producing scripted plays; and the National Coalition Against Censorship, who have published “The Show Must Go On: A Toolkit for Organizing Against Theatre Censorship in Public Schools.”
Through participation in national organizations like AATE and EDTA, drama teachers are able to develop support networks across the country. In community and solidarity, drama teachers are able to develop skills to meet the needs of an ever-diversifying student population, improve classroom instruction, promote deeper arts learning, and respond to classroom and community challenges in turbulent times.
