The Theater Immersion course, part of Steppenwolf’s Arts Exchange Program, is offered to Chicago-area teachers in connection with the Chicago Public Schools. This course is designed to train teachers to improve student achievement by integrating theater arts principles and practices into their instruction methods. Chicago Public Schools teacher Judy Reed has been part of the Arts Exchange programming for four years. Backstage asked her to talk about her Steppenwolf experience:
There’s just so much that I’ve gotten out of the Immersion project. It honestly changes the way you look at your classes. I started taking the Theater Immersion courses because I was looking to step outside the box as a teacher. I never liked to do the same things in my classroom over and over. I honestly think it makes you tired, and the kids pick up on that. I have been trying new things during my entire career as a teacher, and this is my 33rd year. When I got the information about the Immersion project in the mail one summer, I signed up because it just sounded like fun.
And it was fun, but it was also incredibly useful. We learned a lot of techniques that work well in the classroom –things like group warm-ups. They’re like coordinated exercises, both physical and vocal. Warm-ups are nice for bell-ringers, because they’re physical. They’re also nice because they teach the kids to be focused and disciplined by being coordinated with their movement and their breathing. It even helps them to get to know each other, by doing things as a group and seeing how everyone moves and works as a team.
The Immersion classes also reacquainted me with the idea that different kids learn in different ways. Not everyone excels verbally or mathematically. Just earlier this week, we were reading Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. We read four stories, and some of them feel very foreign, very dense. I had my class do “tableaus” of the story instead of just reading the text. In other words, I had them get into groups, choose a moment in one of the stories and create a living picture of that section of text or the ideas expressed in it. And they weren’t allowed to tell us which moment it was – the rest of the class had to figure out what they were watching. It was really great. Getting into Chaucer physically and getting the students to understand the text visually helps many of the kids to really understand these difficult stories from the inside.
Also, I chose to teach Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye this year, because Arts Exchange is producing the adaptation this season. Teaching Artist Kimberly Senior is going to come in and work with my kids before we attend the production and help them make dramatic scenes from the novel. That’s one of the truly great things about this program – the interaction we get to have with these teaching artists! In the end, that is what is most unique about the teacher experience in the Theater Immersion project. It’s the respect that the Steppenwolf teaching artists give us as teachers, and as their students.