Active Learning on Center Stage: Theater as a Tool for Medical Education

Introduction: Knowledge and skill development related to communication must incorporate both affective and behavioral components, which are often difficult to deliver in a learning activity. Using theater techniques and principles can provide medical educators with tools to teach communication concepts. Methods: This 75-minute faculty development workshop presents a variety of techniques from theater and adapts them for use in medical education. Using examples related to diversity and inclusion, this session addresses general educational and theater principles, role-play, sociodrama, applied improvisation, and practical aspects of involving theater partners. The session materials include a PowerPoint presentation with facilitator notes, interactive activities to demonstrate each modality, and an evaluation. The sessions can be extended to longer formats as needed. Results: Forty-five participants at Learn Serve Lead 2016: The AAMC Annual Meeting attended the 75-minute session. We emailed 32 participants 5 months after the conference, and eight responded. Participants reported that their confidence level in using theater techniques as a tool for medical education increased from low-to-medium confidence presession to high confidence postsession. All survey respondents who were actively teaching said they had made changes to their teaching based on the workshop. All commented that they appreciated the active learning in the session. Many indicated they would appreciate video or other follow-up resources. Discussion: Principles and techniques from theater are effective tools to convey difficult-to-teach concepts related to communication. This workshop presents tools to implement activities in teaching these difficult concepts

The Play’s the Thing: Experimentally Examining the Social and Cognitive Effects of School Field Trips to Live Theater Performances

Field trips to see theater performances are a long-standing educational practice, however, there is little systematic evidence demonstrating educational benefits. This article describes the results of five random assignment experiments spanning two years where school groups were assigned by lottery to attend a live theater performance, or for some groups, watch a movie-version of the same story. We find significant educational benefits from seeing live theater, including higher levels of tolerance, social perspective taking, and stronger command of the plot and vocabulary of those plays. Students randomly assigned to watch a movie did not experience these benefits. Our findings also suggest that theater field trips may cultivate the desire among students to frequent the theater in the future

An Analysis of the Problems of Actor-Behavior in Educational Theater

PROBLEM: Drama is a unique art in that it uses people as its tools. No artist would be justified in practicing his art without a thorough knowledge of how his tools function. Actor behavior, then, becomes an important consideration for any director of educational theater. Although much information is available on what the actor should do, there have apparently been no studies attempting to determine how a director in educational theater can best get an actor to carry out his assignment if the actor\u27s behavior is maladjusted. This study, then, proposes to describe and to analyze problems in educational theater which arise from actor\u27s maladjusted behavior, and to suggest some psychologically sound solutions to these problems.SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION: If a director of educational theater is to justify his activity educationally, the welfare of the student actor must be of primary importance. Assisting the students to acquire adjustive behavioral habits can be a major contribution of this activity. Often the knowledge of what causes the actor to behave as he does will, in itself, indicate the remedy without further study. Understanding, patience, and confidence appear to be the traits most necessary for a director if he is to avoid mal-adjustive behavior by the actor. Although the study seems to have posed more questions than it answered, perhaps it has made some small contribution to this vast unexplored area of educational theater

Puppets and The Theater

Summary: Discussion of the design and incorporation of theater techniques, such as the Campesino Theater and puppets in an Educational Fair and their use as instruments of literacy and consciousness awareness within rural communities

PROBLEMATIC SCHOOL THEATER: INTERPRETING AESTHETICS AND PEDAGOGY

The phenomenon of school theater if classified includes the following issues: 1) the resources of teachers and coaches who are not all art education backgrounds, and understand the concepts of theater and theater (dramaturgy, acting techniques, and directing methods, 2) still a negative perception of school theater 3) goodwill and school interpretation of the purpose and benefits of school theater (just perform, practice community or human character building). The school theater is a form of activity that produces beauty with novelty in the work of the show. The work of theater performances in question is the artwork that berdramaturgi as a 'theater process'. Theaterpedagogy is interpreted as a theater education, educational process, and theater learning process. A process of changing the attitude and conduct of a person or group of people in an effort to mature human beings through the efforts of teaching and training; processes, ways, and deeds educate with, through / and use the art of theater. To solve the problem of school theater required renewal of the method in running the school theater based on aesthetic thinking and pedagogy

Developing the Critical Verbatim Theater Artist during the Pandemic: A Transatlantic Collaboration

Following recent social upheavals and an unprecedented pandemic, the development of theater students to work with stories from the community has become more urgent. Because verbatim theater brings to focus real voices and often involves sensitive topics, artists/educators consider key ethical questions before their engagement with educational or community contexts. Artists/educators are developed within the fieldwork of applied theater, during their study at university, through supervision to engage communities. The pandemic made such fieldwork difficult due to online learning and teaching, so university educators tested alternative ways of simulating the experience of working with participants. This article analyzes the rationale, application and evaluation of an educational verbatim theater case study that involved British theater students and American nursing students, from the University of Chichester and Kent State University respectively. It identifies how international collaborations might offer an alternative environment to fieldwork by inviting students to consider key ethical questions before their engagement with communities. The narrative of practice reveals how it was rooted in Paulo Freire’s pedagogy. The artist/educator’s reflection highlights how such collaborations invite students to explore dialectics and the ethics of representation in verbatim theater, and to develop accountability and empathy when working with participants, which hopefully, they bring to their future fieldwork

A production of Everyman as produced at Luther Memorial Church, Omaha, Nebraska

In as much as the success of a dramatic production depends on the skill of the playwright, the creativity of the director and the performances of the actors involved, it would seem that the survival of the theater is dependent on these skills. Much can be done to enhance these skills in the Educational Theater

Melodrama of Migration: Suffering, Performance, and Stardom in Ricardo Lee’s DH: Domestic Helper

This essay revisits DH: Domestic Helper, a 1992 play from the Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA) that explores how Philippine labor out-migration ensnares female migrant subjects in states of perennial leave-takings and tentative resettlements abroad. The discussion comprehends the suffering that overseas Filipina workers experience, as well as the agency that they demonstrate through performance in everyday life outside their source country. This essay concludes with an inter-subjective analysis of the very star and ultimate persuasion of PETA’s phenomenal theater production, Nora Aunor, the melodramatic mode of theater making, and the topic of labor out-migration. By putting these issues side by side, this essay discursively intertwines stardom, theater, the domestic, and the diasporic

Arizona Science Center

Located in downtown Phoenix, the Arizona Science Center features more than 300 hands-on exhibits, a state-of-the-art planetarium, a five-story giant-screen theater, live demonstrations, traveling exhibitions, and science programs for people of all ages. The website provides online companion guides to exhibits, planetarium presentations and films, including Coral Reefs, Arizona Skies, Cosmic Coasters, Starry Story Time, and Solar Grand Tour. Off site programming and traveling exhibits include the Star Lab portable planetarium, Arizona Rocks, Arizona Water, and Chemyseries. Educational levels: Informal education