Equity & Access Professional Learning

Developing Citizen-Teachers Through Performance Arts in the Summer Institute

Summary:

The authors describe their integration of the arts, particularly process drama, into the summer institute as a vehicle for providing equity, supporting educational reform, and promoting the concept of the citizen-teacher. Originally published on January 3, 2006

Authors Nancy Mellin McCracken and Anthony Manna, with Darla Wagner and Bonnie Molnar, describe the journey they undertook integrating the arts into the summer institute. Over a ten-year period, 1996–2006, they turned the arts into a vehicle for providing equity, supporting educational reform, and promoting the concept of the citizen-teacher.

The monograph describes three activities in detail: a writing wall, performance poetry, and process drama, showing how each addresses state academic content standards for writing while developing the participants’ capacity as citizen-teachers. Extensive appendices provide information on implementing these activities.

This post is part of the Monographs collection.

Up next

Content type
Enabling Communities and Collaborative Responses to Teaching Demonstrations
By Janet A. Swenson, Diana Mitchell
This monograph explains a useful protocol developed by Red Cedar Writing Project for responding to demonstrations in the Summer Institute, called the Collaborative Responses to Teaching Demonstrations (CRTD). This response takes the form of a letter to the person offering the demonstration, thus providing responders with opportunities to draft and revise a piece with a clear audience and purpose. The monograph includes discussions of each aspect of the protocol, as well as tools to help prepare teachers for response, both prior to and during the Summer Inst
Read more
Content type
A Work in Progress: The Benefits of Early Recruitment for the Summer Institute
By Anne-Marie Hall, Roger Shanley, and Flory Simon
Of particular interest to teacher leaders planning their site’s invitational institute, this monograph from the Southern Arizona Writing Project describes how site leaders' addressed the challenges of recruitment by revising their year-round calendar to more seamlessly integrate pre and post-institute experiences with other site programming. By starting recruitment efforts for the next summer immediately following the current summer’s institute and building in stronger mentoring and pre-institute events focused on the development of teacher demonstrations, site leaders found that institute participants were better acclimated and prepared. An additional benefit they found was that this new sequence increased the diversity of participating teachers.
Read more