Living Newspaper Teacher Workshop Launches Second Year of Groundbreaking Program

June 23, 2007

At 8:30 on a recent Saturday morning, twenty local high school and middle school teachers trickled into the Winship drama building on The University of Texas at Austin campus. They sipped coffee, nibbled on pastries, and talked quietly to their friends and colleagues as they waited for the second annual Living Newspaper Summer Teacher Workshop to begin. The activities and information that made up the workshop on this documentary form of theater were developed with the input of teachers, graduate students, and program staff who participated in the pilot year of this innovative interdisciplinary program. Workshop facilitators emphasized the information, tools, and activities most helpful to classes that created Living Newspapers in 2006-7, while encouraging participants to continue developing and adapting the program to their needs.

Following a welcome by Evan Carton, director of the Humanities Institute, Michelle Ludwig, theater teacher at St. Stephen’s Episcopal School and Theater Arts field specialist for the Living Newspaper Resource Guide, led the teachers through the first of the many hands-on activities on the agenda: the Group Contract exercise. In silence, the teachers moved about the lobby of the B. Iden Payne Theatre, writing in brightly colored markers on poster-size sheets hung on the walls in response to prompts like, “The thing I most want to learn during today’s workshop is…” and “I am most worried about…”. In her facilitation of the discussion that followed, Michelle pointed out how the activity could be used with students to share their thoughts, concerns, and interests when beginning a Living Newspaper project, as well as to develop group goals for the project.

After this warm-up, Jeremy Dean and Katy Young, Living Newspaper program coordinators, recounted the history of the program, sharing how the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, the Humanities Institute, and the Performance as Public Practice (PPP) program came together in 2005 to begin the journey of creating this drama-based pedagogy model. They also talked briefly about the program’s pilot year: the projects developed by teachers and students at eight schools, the classroom visits by members of the graduate student Consultant Team, and the end-of-year Living Newspaper Showcase performance in May.

Claire Canavan, a doctoral student in the PPP program and a member of the initial planning committee for the program, took over from Jeremy and Katy and ushered the teachers into the Brockett Theatre for a Power Point presentation on the form of Living Newspapers used by the Federal Theater Project (FTP) in the 1930s. Teachers jumped right in with questions about the FTP’s productions, their audiences, and the availability of archived scripts and images.

During the mid-morning session, Josh Clark, a graduate student in Latin American Studies and a human rights scholar with the Rapoport Center, introduced the human rights perspective central to the program. In their acceptance packet, teachers had been instructed to bring in a recent news article on a human rights issue and Josh asked them each to summarize their article and describe the central issue. While the teachers spoke, Josh visually organized the issues along a spectrum of human rights categories. He pointed out in the discussion that followed that how Americans view human rights is not necessarily how other communities do. Often we see human rights abuses occurring overseas, failing to recognize those occurring in our own neighborhoods.

Two teachers from the Liberal Arts and Sciences Academy in Austin, Jason Flowers and Malhaz Jibladze, built on the human rights discussion to introduce the first phase in creating a Living Newspaper in the classroom: research. Jason and Malhaz led the teachers through two postering exercises similar to Group Contract, Picking a Topic and Refining a Topic, that helped the group brainstorm and refine a potential topic for a Living Newspaper performance. They encouraged the group to begin thinking about performance even in the earliest phases of Living Newspaper creation. They asked questions like, “What makes a dramatic news story?” and “What current event/topic would you like to see portrayed on stage?” to bring an awareness of the end product of the project into the research phase. Both Malhaz and Jason attended the workshop in 2006: Jason served as the Social Studies field specialist for the Resource Guide, and Malhaz used Living Newspaper lesson plans in his AP Economics classes in Fall 2006 and Spring 2007. Their firsthand experience with creating Living Newspapers and getting their students excited about their projects enriched their presentation in countless ways.

At noon, the teachers broke for lunch, mingling and chatting over the sandwiches and snacks provided. Halfway through the lunch hour, teachers who had used Living Newspaper lesson plans in the 06-07 school year and their graduate student consultants performed impromptu skits on the common obstacles to a successful Living Newspaper project. These included budgeting enough time, encouraging the students to take ownership of their projects, helping students find reliable research sources, providing evaluations of student work throughout the creation process, and the many diverse opportunities for performance from a staged reading to full performance.

As an example of a successful full performance, Michelle showed a clip of her students’ Living Newspaper on children’s rights, Got Rights? The Chronicles of Stolen Youth, written and performed by a St. Stephen’s after school theater troupe in Fall 2007. Michelle, in conjunction with Ann David, a graduate student and Living Newspaper Teacher Liaison who served as the writing consultant for the script, spoke about their experiences working with the high schoolers on such intense issues as child prostitution, child soldiers, and the juvenile justice system. Michelle recounted how the students became personally invested in the issues, educating their friends and families outside of rehearsals about the situations they uncovered through research.

After the video, Michelle, Ann, and Claire Canavan introduced the second phase of creating a Living Newspaper: writing. Again, awareness of performance requirements and the theatrical elements of certain news stories contribute strongly to the dialogue chosen for a Living Newspaper script. Using two exercises from the Resource Guide, Visual Mapping and Body Maps, the facilitators got the teachers identifying language in news stories that would make a powerful Living Newspaper script on Guantanamo Bay and the human rights issues at play in the U.S.’s detaining of suspects there. Working in small groups, teachers arranged the same five quotes from recent newspapers and the Department of Defense’s website into their own unique “story map” and presented them to the rest of the group. One group decided to share their map in performance, another with a drawing, and still another through reading and repeating certain lines from the pieces of text. Already, in 20 minutes, the group was demonstrating the varied learning methods potentially used by students in a Living Newspaper project.

In the performance phase of creating a Living Newspaper, students bring their scripts to life with their bodies and voices. Michelle, Claire, and Rebecca Hewett, another PPP graduate student, led teachers through a series of improv movement exercises from the Resource Guide designed to get participants expressing themselves in visual pictures. By using the lesson plan Staging With Images, the facilitators were able to demonstrate how bodies can communicate as much, if not more, than dialogue. Participants in the exercise created evocative tableaux both on a pre-determined theme or phrase, like “detainee” or “liberty,” as well as on the participant’s own imaginative vision. The rest of the group gathered around the frozen image and volunteered their immediate impressions and interpretations of the scene.

After trying out this abbreviated Living Newspaper unit and getting on their feet with activities from the Resource Guide, the teachers had the rest of the afternoon to talk in small groups with each other, the field specialists, program staff, returning teachers, and graduate consultants about the logistics of using the program in their classrooms. Teachers divided up by subject area – English, theater arts, social studies – and spoke candidly about the perceived obstacles to creating a Living Newspaper with their students, when during the school year they might be able to do it, and what support they would need from program staff and grad consultants. This conversation was a chance for teachers to process the day’s workshop with each other and begin to envision a Living Newspaper unit within the specific parameters of their unique teaching environment.

To close the workshop, everyone reconvened to share the highlights of their small-group discussions. Teachers also conveyed their thoughts on the workshop and the program in written evaluations. As only the second professional development training of this burgeoning program, the Living Newspaper Summer Teacher Workshop will continue to grow and change to meet the needs of the approximately two dozen teachers who will attend each year. But by showing how movement, creativity, and the discussion of relevant human rights issues have a place in any classroom, the Living Newspaper program and workshop provided these twenty teachers with an innovative hands-on tool for engaging students of all levels.

For information about the third annual Living Newspapers Summer Teacher Workshop, held on June 21, 2008, please see our Current Events page.