Theatre for Young Audiences

Theatre for Young Audiences is a Theatre class and an Academic Service Learning project at Northern Michigan University, taught by Ansley Valentine. In this class we will be touring two shows around the Upper Peninsula to high school and elementary schools. We are touring with an adaptation of Midsummer Night's Dream and with an original piece, that has yet to have a formal title, but will be a play about Michigan History. 

I am very excited for this course because it directly relates to my career goals. I am a double major in Theatre and Elementary Education at NMU. As of right now I am not sure exactly where I will want to apply my degree, be it an elementary school teacher, or community activity planner, or something completely different, I know that I am passionate about teaching the youth about the arts. I think this class is going to be a great experience for me to start fine tuning my path as a future educator. 

I have copied the formal objectives from the syllabus as well as discussed my own goals for this class. I hope that this blog will help me keep an excellent record of our project as it develops, as well as provide some of the highlights of the project being put into action. With all that being said the formal and personal objectives are listed below:

Formal Objectives:

-        -  To gain a clear understanding of educational requirements and standards in the public schools and how the arts can be applicable to them

-          -To learn the basic tenants of playwriting for a youth audience

-        -  To articulate the standard rules and practices of a touring theatre company

-          -To create successful assessment measures and instruments that can evaluate work in support of grant application

Personal Objectives:

-To gain through this course an understanding of educating students through and about theatre. I hope to gain some practical experience in applying the arts into a lesson plan, based on the content of the shows we tour.

-To learn more about the process of grant writing, through completing a grant report that helped us fund the project.

-To research and discover more national, and possibly international, community art activism programs, their missions, and how they operate. 

-To construct dramaturgical research of both shows, and apply this research to create study guides and assessments. 

I am looking forward to starting this project and will have many updates to follow!