Workman Arts, a Toronto-based theatre and visual arts company with a 20-year history, provides a rich site for re-imagining stigmatised representations of mental illness. Writing and performing against a long tradition of representing people with mental illnesses as incoherent speakers and visually different, company members seek to re-imagine…

In this article, the author shares his reflections on rereading Erving Goffman's book titled "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life." "The Presentation of Self," first published in 1959, was Goffman's first book. Goffman describes the work as "a sort of handbook" and, alternatively, as a "report." His own PhD on the Shetland Islands is quite…

The author needed a way to engage her students in the reading process and found one extremely successful strategy: using Readers' Theater. Readers' Theater "dramatizes" literature through a classroom performance and provides visual and oral stimulus to students who are not used to using imagination to appreciate literary texts. It involves a…

This article describes three creative arts exercises designed to promote belonging, connectedness, and wellness among adolescents with and without disabilities. The scenarios are multifaceted and based on utilization of creative visual and performing arts. Creative outlets may help groups be more effective and meaningful for participants,…

The author has been a theater artist in Chicago and Elgin public schools for over 10 years, and for the last four she has been leading professional development workshops for teaching artists and classroom teachers both in the United States and abroad. Teachers all over the world have asked her the same questions: "How do you get new teachers…

As artists seek new ways to reflect an increasingly digital and global culture, theatrical dance in the UK and Europe has seen a growing collaboration and cross-fertilisation between forms of dance, theatre, visual art, film and technology. As the boundaries between artistic disciplines continue to blur, it seems clear that dance audiences need to…

The study explores students' and lecturers' experiences of group work assessment in a performing arts department that includes undergraduate studies in theatre, dance and film. Working from the perspective that assessment is a socially situated practice informed by, and mediated through, the socio-political context within which it occurs, this…

The Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Education (HMIE) publication, "External quality arrangements for Scotland's colleges," September 2008, specifies that HM Inspectors (HMIs) will produce a number of subject aspect reports over the four years 2008-12. These reports complement in a subject-specific context the generic evaluations of…

After spending nearly a decade performing in musical theater, David Ladd found the role of a lifetime teaching choir and chairing the music department at New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois. And there's no doubt his enthusiasm and life experience have made a dramatic impact on the school's program, which received Grammy National Signature…

Two diverse groups of urban and suburban adolescent reluctant readers enthusiastically discussed a performance of "A Wrinkle in Time". For many of these students, it was their first experience with the theatre. What was even more important than sharing their first theatrical experience, however, was that this was the first time they completed,…

About 60% of Nigerians live in rural areas with poor access roads and health facilities, near-absent communication media, unemployment, alienation and disempowerment by the political leadership. This scenario has excluded the rural Nigerian from meaningful participation in development action. A bottom-up participatory approach to…

The transfer student phenomenon in higher education is as increasingly complex as the transfer students causing the phenomenon. The collection of narratives in this study reflected transfer experiences of theatre students who were navigating the educational pipeline from community colleges to four-year institutions to major in the theatre…

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…

This paper presents an approach for preparing children to experience a theatrical performance, "theatre semiotics preparation." This programme introduces children to the specific elements of the theatrical performance (music, props, costumes, etc.). In the study we compare the efficacy of this new programme with that of traditional…

This article describes how Readers Theatre was implemented as an engaging means for reading fluency instruction in a second-grade classroom. A weekly Readers Theatre format was utilized over the course of a school year. The format was added to the existing literacy program. Data collected during the school year revealed significant gains in…