The Global Writes (GW) model is a well-designed performing arts integrated literacy program that builds local and global support among students, teachers, and arts partners through the use of innovative technologies. Through local partnerships between schools and arts organizations forged by GW, classroom teachers and local teaching artists build…

The author shares his experiences teaching a unit based on the Broadway musical "In the Heights" as a way of engaging the cultural identity of his students, mainly Dominican Americans. The unit he created around the musical was initially built in an effort to make Dominican culture overt in the classroom, fulfilling pedagogical ideas…

The "Arts Achieve: Impacting Student Success in the Arts" project involves a partnership between the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) and five of the city's premier arts organizations. "Arts Achieve" provides intensive and targeted professional development to arts teachers over a three-year period. The goal of the…

A theater project situated within an Alternative to Incarceration Program (ATIP), the Insight Project provided a venue for youth to engage in storytelling and dramatic performance, and allowed for those stories to find diverse and interested audiences. For the young men and women involved, authoring occurred at multiple instances and in multiple…

All theatre programs are not created equal. This qualitative study set out to determine the graduating students' perception of satisfaction and success after attending a four year conservatory theatre program. I conducted two interviews with seven of the twelve graduating seniors. The initial interview was conducted after graduation, and the…

Bethel Woods Center for the Arts is a performing arts venue that includes the Woodstock Festival grounds in Sullivan County, New York. The center is adjacent to the original preserved site where visitors can see the historic field where hundreds of thousands of rock music lovers gathered in August 1969. In this article, students analyze a…

In this article, the author explores the ways in which new teaching and learning geographies were crafted by adolescents and adults through the engagement and performance of multimodal literacy practices. They did so by communicating and representing knowledge through the manipulation of multiple expressive modalities, including pens for writing…

Educators must consider how learning environments can structure experiences to produce desired learning outcomes. In this paper, the author describes one type of learning environment where youth have the opportunity to construct adaptive, emergent identities--a "dramaturgical" process that structures the telling, adapting, and…

The results of a two-year study indicate that collaborative testing is a valuable pedagogical strategy that can both assess and enhance student learning. After finishing their first attempt at each exam, students were given a second attempt either working collaboratively in small groups or individually with open books and notes. Collaborative…

This article describes Nilaja Sun's groundbreaking one-woman show about a TA, her students, and her school, and includes interviews with the author/performer, an excerpt of the work, and a discussion of the organization behind it.

Argues that if black theater is to continue to mature or be infused with new ideas, new forms and new points of view, it must find a way to sustain neighborhood theaters, taking as a key example Woodie King's New Federal Theater, which is located on the lower East Side of New York City. (JM)

In this article, the author describes a collaboration between The Actors' Fund of America and 12 schools in the South Bronx. The true purpose of the STARRR (Substitute Teachers for the Arts and 3Rs) program was to establish relationships between artists and schools. Three years later, the author sees the results of those relationships: so many…

This article presents contributions from teaching artists about Teaching Artist professional development across the country in theater programs and through museum programs. In the process, the authors have come to realize how much they still have to learn about what is available (how badly they need a funded research project to inventory the state…

Now entering its eighth year, TheatreLink, Manhattan Theater Club's Internet-based distance-learning project remains the most exciting and most challenging initiative. MTC's Education Program had existed for seven years (since 1989 to be exact) before it started TheatreLink. During that early period MTC created an array of programs, all of them…

This collection of essays explores various arts education-specific evaluation tools, as well as considers Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and the inclusion of people with disabilities in the design of evaluation instruments and strategies. Prominent evaluators Donna M. Mertens, Robert Horowitz, Dennie Palmer Wolf, and Gail Burnaford are…