Taking Action: Teaching Participatory Community-based Theater

[prepared by Mark Weinberg, edited by Linda Frye Burnham]

Introduction

Twelve college and university teachers of community-based theater practice came together for "Creating and Teaching the Community-Based Theatre Course," a roundtable discussion on August 5, 2001. The discussion was organized by the Theatre as Social Change (TASC) task force of American Theater in Higher Education (ATHE), for the 2001 ATHE conference in Chicago. In preparation for the roundtable, TASC’s Mark Weinberg compiled documentation of some of the educators' course work and published it on a Web site, including course descriptions, bibliographies and other extremely useful observations on learning and teaching community-arts techniques.

For this article, CAN has excerpted a portion of the material, where teachers answer key questions about how to get a course included in curriculum, materials, structure, goals and concerns. The teachers talk about participating in community-based arts projects as a way for students to learn about the environment in which they will live for a formative four years; about the academic, artistic and activist reasons for doing so; about collaborative and experiential learning; and about the after-effects of this learning.

We are grateful to Mark Weinberg for mining this information. (This article’s title, "Taking Action," is the title of a course taught by Amy Sarno at Beloit College in Wisconsin.)

For a listing of majors, minors and courses in community-based art in the U.S. and elsewhere, see CAN’s ongoing Community-Arts Education and Training list in the CAN Reading Room.

—Linda Burnham, Community Arts Network

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Original CAN/API publication: September 2001