Arts Educator
Arts Education, Designed for Everyone
Every student that walks into my classroom will always have their voice heard, regardless of their background. I’ve worked with students all over the city of Chicago from every background imaginable, from students struggling with violence on the south side to neurodiverse learners in therapeutic schools. The benefits of Arts Education are immense for all students, and I aim to ensure that all students get to experience those benefits, regardless of the struggles they may be facing outside of the classroom. Through Trauma Informed Teaching Practices, I always ensure that every student is able to have their needs met in a safe and healthy way, while also accomplishing the goals of each residency. This way, every student is able to have fun, and be themselves in an inclusive classroom.
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Fun
Every kid wants nothing more than to have fun. As a teaching artist, I create environments where students have fun and create something wonderful while still learning something new and valuable.
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Authentic
Nobody should ever feel they can’t be their authentic self. In my classrooms, I strive to create spaces that are open, comfortable, and free of judgment so that every student can bring their authentic self into their work and create art that is truly meaningful to them.
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Inclusive
An unfortunate truth of Western theatre is that it has largely held a singular voice for much of its history. Throughout my work, as a teaching artist, I aim to bring diverse and exciting voices into the classroom so that all students — regardless of their identity — can see themselves in the work.
Sample Lesson Plan
Here is a sample lesson plan from my time teaching with Auditorium Theatre. The goal of this lesson was to help students learn and understand how actors use their voices to create and demonstrate character.
For context, this portion of the ArtsXChange residency was intended to help the students, and the classroom teacher, gain a basic understanding of acting and arts activities. The lesson plan provided is from the third lesson of five. At this point in the residency, the students learned how to use their body to convey story through Tableau, and after this lesson students will shift to performing and improvising after having learned the basic concepts of performance and acting.
In this lesson, students first observed acting through a series of videos. They both listened and watched these videos to observe how the actor’s use their voices to convey a character. From there, the students began working on a project to perform their own small scenes keeping what they observed in mind. They performed this on a following day.
