This article explores the risks and potentials of staging vulnerability in community theatre with teenage girls. By drawing on postconstructionist and spatial theories, the article elaborates on how aesthetic spaces emerge when interwoven with spaces of vulnerability. Exploring how vulnerability becomes a generative, or restrictive force, the…

Kaiser's Room, a New York-based theater arts education organization; St. Francis de Sales School for the Deaf in Brooklyn, N.Y.; and the New York Deaf Theatre are piloting a theater arts program for deaf students with multiple disabilities. The goal: to develop a school-community partnership that provides culturally responsive, linguistically…

Purpose: The purpose of this transcendental, phenomenological study was to explore how involvement in theatre arts programs helps to improve social functioning skills (SFS) in adolescents with autism spectrum disorder, from a drama teacher's perspective, in middle schools in the central coast region of California. Methodology: A qualitative…

The focus in this exploratory multiple case study was to examine the reading comprehension and enjoyment of four male, English-speaking teenage students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) during a 12-week Story Club series. Parents' perceptions of their teenager's reading comprehension were also considered. Story Club involved modifying a young…

This article is aimed at exploring the political characteristics of the drama space, which reflects, juxtaposes, and opposes particular sites in a participant's everyday life, such as the school. By putting spatial theories to work, this article investigates the drama space belonging to an all-girls community group in Sweden, participation in…

David McNees' deep foray into creativity theory and drama begins with mindfulness as a preparation for adolescent focus. This article discusses role incarnation, the correlation of the three-period lesson to Landy's role theory, the creation and re-creation of personal story and identity, archetypal heroes, and how the adaptability learned in…

This article explores the way gender resonates in Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" through an active study of live performance. Combining pedagogy with performance as an interpretive methodology, this research focuses upon using my unique classroom situation, teaching ultra-Orthodox Jewish adolescent females, as a platform for analysis.…

This article examines some of the performance outcomes from a practised-based research project that took place with adolescent girls attending an after-school drama club. Participants experimented with slapstick humour in a series of workshops, before presenting their own devised physical comedy performance for a live audience. Comic performances…

Forum Theatre (FT), a participatory improvised theatre form, raises consciousness, enables debate and critical reflection, and encourages a democratic form of knowledge production that engages the audience in their own learning and unlearning. I used FT as a platform to understand how 15- to 18-year-old learners, in a co-educational school in the…

This article explores the arts' potential to transform the relationships between students and teachers, so that education becomes an "as if" world, where education is an act of social justice. Interweaving themes from the children's book "Click Clack Moo, Cows that Type" with theories of transformative pedagogy and their own…

Both theatre artists and educators believe the theatre has many advantages as a vehicle for the promotion of social and political issues. This study examines how the Israeli theatre represents the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and promotes peace and tolerance among young people. The study, conducted between the years 2005 and 2007, included 26…

Every year the author and his colleagues take their grade 12 English students to see four plays at one of Canada's major theaters. Chatting about the series on the last day of class, his students asked him if he had seen "the blue glow from the back row." Laughing at his bewilderment, they told him that during the performances so many…

This article provides a brief overview of the Teen Interactive Theater Education (TITE) curriculum, the theory behind its inception, and the expected outcomes. TITE is an innovative positive youth development program that engages young people in the consideration of pertinent topics in today's society through the use of experiential activities…

The theme for the 59th annual conference of the Association of Literacy Educators and Researchers was Making a Difference in Our Diverse Communities. The meeting took place in Costa Mesa, California in 2015. In the first section of the Yearbook, Dr. J. Helen Perkins's presidential address shared the story of her journey as an educator and how it…

This article reflects on outcomes of a playmaking project conducted with 14-20-year-old urban students in the USA. The playmaking experience was part of a larger research project designed to facilitate students' understandings of the ways in which their own experiences of discrimination are reflected in pervasive inequity at the societal level,…