Theatre of the At-Risk!
An artistic intervention involving the creation of an afterschool drama club to engage and empower at-risk teens.
What’s It All About?
“[F]or students at-risk of poor educational outcomes, drama is effective for teaching social, emotional, and physical development. Drama allows at-risk students to represent externally what takes place internally. It places students in a leadership role when they might not be chosen as leaders in a traditional academic school setting. This increases self-esteem which crosses over into the classroom to support academic success in all subjects”
Juliet Schiller
An “artistic intervention” disguised as an afterschool program that leans heavily on Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed.
Students learn to improvise, and through improvisation, learn how to devise plays based on their experiences. The culminating project is a play they have created as a group at the end of the school year. Ultimately, once the students start to get the hang of this sort of work, they can have more and more autonomy, leaving me to function mostly as an advisor (at least in a perfect world).
The amount students participate can earn them more privileges (such as use of sound and video equipment). This can provide other avenues to express their ideas, and they can work these into the final play if they want to. An added goal is that the students who learn the more technical aspects of theater can be the people who train new recruits the following year. Ideally, the students would have the know-how and confidence to run the whole process on their own after the first year (though they would obviously need supervision of some sort).
Part of my origin story.
My eyes were opened.
Created as my final project for Doris Sommers' “Cultural Agents” class at Harvard Extension School, Fall 2016.
Here I was introduced to Paolo Friere, Friedrich Schiller, John Dewey, Augusto Boal, Jacques Ranciere, and others, all of whom found their way into my thesis. This class changed the way I thought about art, but also to some degree, teaching.
Works Cited
Schiller, Juliet. Drama for At-Risk Students: A Strategy For Improving Academic and Social Skills Among Public Middle School Students. MS Thesis, School of Education, Dominican University of California, 2008.
Image credits
The “Theatre of the At-Risk” image is a modified version of this Theatre of the Oppressed image by Morgan Andrews from the Philadelphia Theatre of the Oppressed website.
The (unmodified) UFO image that signifies my origin story is from the Space Flat Galaxy Radio Icon Set by Chanut is Industries and is licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 Unported License.
