The author uses a screenplay form of experimental writing to enhance the sensory richness of her bilingual data. The author takes her academic prose and transforms it, using multilayered scenes to better portray both her and bilingual son's voices. Voices often squeak with conflict resulting mainly from differences in people's linguistic/cultural…

When children write plays, their wishes, fears, and secrets face an audience. An audience is not a do-gooder making nice. It is not an authority figure with a grudge against one's race or class. When it laughs at the jokes or applauds, it can be trusted. It is saying this play--and by extension its author--fits into the world on its own terms. In…

This paper aims to contribute to our understanding of how researchers and adult and continuing education scholars can work collectively with communities of adults. It illustrates the links between theory and practice in community-university engagement. The paper expands our understanding of the ways in which research data and arts-based activities…

Background: The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's (UWM) Urban Teacher World Pre-College Academy works with American high school students to explore what it means to be an educator in the urban context. High school students from underrepresented groups reside at the UWM campus to work with university faculty, staff and students to explore careers…

This article examines relationships among process, product, and playmaking in a southeastern playwriting and performance program for teen girls, Playmaking for Girls (PFG). The authors have chosen to focus on tensions between process and product. Such tensions are present in the challenges teachers experience when privileging student-centered…

Sharing research findings with others is a fundamental concern of researchers. Qualitative research results may be disseminated in conventional (e.g., scholarly text or presentation) or innovative (e.g., art, drama, or poetry) forms. Given that researchers should select the best form of presentation of their work, it is worthwhile to explore…

When children come together to play dramatically they are involved in the creation of an improvised text. This text emerges spontaneously via the moment-by-moment contributions of individual players who must operate in a highly collaborative way in order to achieve cohesion. This paper reports on a research project involving several groups of 11-…

Playmaking for Girls, founded by Rachel May and directed by Susie Spear Purcell, assembles a diverse ensemble of teaching artists committed to using playwriting and performance to help with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated teen girls to help them "think and thus act for themselves" (Freden, 2001, p. 70). These teaching artists, with the…

Undergraduate theater students rarely get the chance to work on a major world premiere, but this year hundreds of them will. Currently, more than 70 colleges and universities are participating in "365 Days/365 Plays," an ambitious project from Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks. Every week, as they mount their portion of this epic…

The article reports an empirical research study documenting how an integrated playwriting program within an urban, low-socioeconomic status middle school with a majority Latino/a population facilitates increased students' confidence regarding writing in addition to helping students learn transferable writing skills as measured by a districtwide…

Blending the arts into students' learning of science concepts through role-play and drama is unusual pedagogy in schools. For seven Australian Year Five students seeking extended learning, advanced scientific concepts were learned during the creative process of script writing and production of a science play called "Hectic Electric". A…

Argues that the leading professional children's theaters should commit themselves to a group of proven professional playwrights as the surest way to nurture the feasibility and aesthetic sensibility of children's theater. (SR)

In conventional drama, circularity is a positive thing, a return to the beginning, a symbol of the cyclical, generative nature of life. Part of John Guare's intent in his post-Absurdist play, "The House of Blue Leaves," is to help establish a new theatrical aesthetic by violating theatrical convention. For Guare, circularity is not a…

Suggests that many drama teachers feel that "doing plays" runs counter to their purposes in drama. Shows that the writing of plays and the presentation of dramatic experience may be activities of the same kind, both relying on attention to context and demanding an appreciation of the ordered nature of life. (MG)