Exploring Online Participatory Theatre During COVID-19: Reflections on Adapting, Delivering, and Evaluating Student-Led Theatre for Health Workshops

The COVID-19 pandemic forced the higher education community to quickly shift and adapt courses to the online environment. While traditional theatre programs struggled, the flexible nature of applied theatre created the space for students and instructors to explore and adapt existing forms, such as Forum Theatre and Sociodrama, and create engaging online workshops for the public. Over the course of 2020-21, students in the University of Florida’s Applied Theatre for Health program developed, delivered, and evaluated online health and wellness workshops for the public. This report focuses on two such projects: 1) a workshop on female reproductive health, and 2) a workshop on addiction and recovery. Student facilitators carried out program evaluations through online surveys and focus groups. Workshop participants positively viewed the online participatory experience and the projects succeeded in improving participant knowledge of the subject matter. Several additional benefits of online facilitation were noted by both facilitators and participants

Rustbelt Theater: Children\u27s Environmental Justice Narratives from South Elyria, OH

Children\u27s knowledge of their eco-social environment is rarely privileged in environmental literature. Their voices help to broaden conceptions of environmental justice, to the benefit of both the environmental justice movement and the emerging discipline of environmental studies. In this community-based research project conducted in partnership with Save Our Children, an afterschool/summer enrichment center, in South Elyria, Ohio, third and fourth grade children utilized Theater of the Oppressed techniques to create an environmental justice narrative in the form of an original play. The goal of Theater of the Oppressed is for participants to dramatically analyze real-life oppressions/obstacles/challenges they face and act out potential solutions to overcome them. I collaborated with the children and staff members at Save Our Children to hold weekly Theater of the Oppressed workshops for an eight-week period. In these workshops, the children explored environmental injustices as it pertained to their own lived experiences and proposed imaginative solutions for dismantling them through an original play. Our community-based research serves as a step towards bringing justice to the city of Elyria by presenting the voices of its residents as an alternative environmental justice narrative that has yet to be heard in the larger environmental justice discussion

Getting In On the Act: How Arts Groups are Creating Opportunities for Active Participation

Arts participation is being redefined as people increasingly choose to engage with art in new, more active and expressive ways. This movement carries profound implications, and fresh opportunities, for the nonprofit arts sector.We are in the midst of a seismic shift in cultural production, moving from a "sit-back-and-be-told culture" to a "making-and-doing-culture." Active or participatory arts practices are emerging from the fringes of the Western cultural tradition to capture the collective imagination. Many forces have conspired to lead us to this point. The sustained economic downturn that began in 2008, rising ticket prices, the pervasiveness of social media, the roliferation of digital content and rising expectations for self-guided, on-demand, customized experiences have all contributed to a cultural environment primed for active arts practice. This shift calls for a new equilibrium in the arts ecology and a new generation of arts leaders ready to accept, integrate and celebrate all forms of cultural practice. This is, perhaps, the defining challenge of our time for artists, arts organizations and their supporters -- to embrace a more holistic view of the cultural ecology and identify new possibilities for Americans to engage with the arts.How can arts institutions adapt to this new environment?Is participatory practice contradictory to, or complementary to, a business model that relies on professional production and consumption?How can arts organizations enter this new territory without compromising their values r artistic ideals?This report aims to illuminate a growing body of practice around participatory engagement (with various illustrative case studies profiled at the end) and dispel some of the anxiety surrounding this sphere of activity

Exploring Creative Community Engagement

Exploring Creative Community Engagement examines the role of artists in a planning process by researching the intentions of planners when they engage an artist to carry out a community engagement process, how the techniques of artists doing “creative community engagement” differ from those employed in more traditional participatory planning processes, explores if there is something about the creative process of being an artist that influences how they design public engagement methods, and seeks to understand what are the characteristics of an artist-led community engagement process that can spark creative problem solving. The research design involves a comparison case study method focused on the public engagement process of the CreateNYC cultural plan and the Boston Creates cultural plan. Key findings are that intentions of planners for the inclusion of artists in public engagement should be clear and that the optimal role for an artist to play in a planning process is in the design of the public process as well as the execution of it. Recommendations include the expansion of artist residencies in planning agencies, launching an artist/planner fellowship program at the American Planning Association, conducting additional research and creating joint planning/arts degrees with universities and colleges in partnership with the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities

Theater and Peacebuilding in Post-Conflict Settings: Participants’ Experiences in the Morning Star Theater Program in South Sudan

This dissertation explores the role of theater for peacebuilding in post-conflict settings through the analysis of experiences of participants in the Morning Star Forum Theater for Peacebuilding in South Sudan. Arts-based activities, including theater, have increasingly gained momentum as viable interventions for peacebuilding in post-conflict zones. Much of the existent research fails to capture the experiences of the theater participants themselves. Using narrative inquiry, this study interviewed 12 community members who participated in the Morning Star Forum Theater event. In particular, this study focused on how experiences of Morning Star Theater events impacted interpersonal growth and relationship-building, thus positively impacting peacebuilding processes. Participants collectively shared positive stories of building relationships with individuals from other conflict communities during and after the event. As well, the study findings illuminate experiences of ongoing peacebuilding efforts among these individuals, underscoring the potential role theater can play in building local capacities and facilitating meaningful engagement of local people in peacebuilding processes. The findings not only add participants’ voices to the debate about the role of theater in peacebuilding in post-conflict settings but also inform us about the tool’s potential in facilitating sustained meaningful engagement of the local population, which is a key aspect in achieving lasting peace. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA (https://aura.antioch.edu) and OhioLINK ETD Center (https://etd.ohiolink.edu)

Playing with purpose: using serious play to enhance participatory development communication

In this article, we argue that serious play and participatory development communication suggest complementary-even synergistic-methodological guidelines for enhancing communication in research. We begin by illustrating how four core functions of serious play closely correspond with key participatory development communication objectives. This synergy is then illustrated by examining the application of two distinct techniques that successfully merge these methodological positions: participatory theater and LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®. Before concluding, we draw attention to important caveats that accompany this integrated research approach. This study focuses on international development research and practice; however, themes discussed throughout have broader relevance to the fields of health, community development, and education

Preparing adolescents attending progressive and no-excuses urban charter schools to analyze, navigate, and challenge race and class inequality

Background/Context: Sociopolitical development (SPD) refers to the processes by which an individual acquires the knowledge, skills, emotional faculties, and commitment to recognize and resist oppressive social forces. A growing body of scholarship has found that such sociopolitical capabilities are predictive in marginalized adolescents of a number of key outcomes, including resilience, academic achievement, and civic engagement. Many scholars have long argued that schools and educators have a central role to play in fostering the sociopolitical development of marginalized adolescents around issues of race and class inequality. Other scholars have investigated school-based practices for highlighting race and class inequality that include youth participatory-action research, critical literacy, and critical service-learning. Objective of Study: The present study sought to add to the existing scholarship on schools as opportunity structures for sociopolitical development. Specifically, this study considered the role of two different schooling models in fostering adolescents' ability to analyze, navigate, and challenge the social forces and institutions contributing to race and class inequality. Setting: The six high schools participating in the present study were all urban charter public high schools located in five northeastern cities. All six schools served primarily low-income youth of color and articulated explicit goals around fostering students' sociopolitical development. Three of these high schools were guided by progressive pedagogy and principles, and three were guided by no-excuses pedagogy and principles. Research Design: The present study compared the sociopolitical development of adolescents attending progressive and no-excuses charter high schools through a mixed methods research design involving pre-post surveys, qualitative interviews with participating adolescents and teachers, and ethnographic field notes collected during observations at participating schools. Results: On average, adolescents attending progressive high schools demonstrated more significant shifts in their ability to analyze the causes of racial inequality, but adolescents attending no-excuses high schools demonstrated more significant shifts in their sense of efficacy around navigating settings in which race and class inequality are prominent. Neither set of adolescents demonstrated significant shifts in their commitment to challenging the social forces or institutions contributing to race and class inequality. Conclusions: Both progressive and no-excuses schools sought to foster adolescents' commitment to challenging race and class inequality, but focused on different building blocks to do so. Further research is necessary to understand the pedagogy and practices that show promise in catalyzing adolescents' analytic and navigational abilities into a powerful commitment to collective social action-the ultimate goal of sociopolitical development

Participatory theater in community health

This manuscript describes the need for innovative strategies in health education through a comprehensive literature review, detail of forty-three participatory theater activities for use in a health context, and field observations of employing participatory theater activities at three different application sites. Through analysis of adolescent health research, invention of original educational methodologies, and observation of personal experience, the manuscript seeks to instill new vision and life into the field of youth sexuality education

Data Theatre as an Entry Point to Data Literacy

Data literacy is a growing area of focus across multiple disciplines in higher education. The dominant forms of introduction focus on computational toolchains and statistical ways of knowing. As data driven decision-making becomes more central to democratic processes, a larger group of learners must be engaged in order to ensure they have a seat at the table in civic settings. This requires a rethinking to support many paths into data literacy. In this paper we introduce "data theatre," a set of activities designed for data novices that may have limited experience or comfort with spreadsheets, math, and other quantitative operations. Through iterative co-design over three workshops, we tested and produced two activity guides for educators, building on long-standing practices in participatory theatre that center social justice and liberation. Our initial findings provide very early evidence that this approach can help these learners overcome hesitations to working with information, begin building a critical perspective when viewing data, and create emotionally impactful data stories told through theatrical performance. This prototype work suggests to us that the concept of "Data theatre" warrants further study to build a more robust understanding of its affordances and limitations.Peer reviewe

Rethinking the difficult patient: Formative qualitative study using participatory theater to improve physician-patient communication in rheumatology

BACKGROUND: Effective physician-patient communication is crucial for positive health outcomes for patients with chronic diseases. However, current methods of physician education in communication are often insufficient to help physicians understand how patients\u27 actions are influenced by the contexts within which they live. An arts-based participatory theater approach can provide the necessary health equity framing to address this deficiency. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to develop, pilot, and conduct a formative evaluation of an interactive arts-based communication skills intervention for graduate-level medical trainees grounded in a narrative representative of the experience of patients with systemic lupus erythematosus. METHODS: We hypothesized that the delivery of interactive communication modules through a participatory theater approach would lead to changes in both attitudes and the capacity to act on those attitudes among participants in 4 conceptual categories related to patient communication (understanding social determinants of health, expressing empathy, shared decision-making, and concordance). We developed a participatory, arts-based intervention to pilot this conceptual framework with the intended audience (rheumatology trainees). The intervention was delivered through routine educational conferences at a single institution. We conducted a formative evaluation by collecting qualitative focus group feedback to evaluate the implementation of the modules. RESULTS: Our formative data suggest that the participatory theater approach and the design of the modules added value to the participants\u27 learning experience by facilitating interconnection of the 4 communication concepts (eg, participants were able to gain insight into both what physicians and patients were thinking about on the same topic). Participants also provided several suggestions for improving the intervention such as ensuring that the didactic material had more active engagement and considering additional ways to acknowledge real-world constraints (eg, limited time with patients) in implementing communication strategies. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings from this formative evaluation of communication modules suggest that participatory theater is an effective method for framing physician education with a health equity lens, although considerations in the realms of functional demands of health care providers and use of structural competency as a framing concept are needed. The integration of social and structural contexts into the delivery of this communication skills intervention may be important for the uptake of these skills by intervention participants. Participatory theater provided an opportunity for dynamic interactivity among participants and facilitated greater engagement with the communication module content