Theater of Translation project in fifth year serving local Title 1 high schools
This year's "Theater of Resilience" was funded with support of the UCI Office of Inclusive Excellence's Confronting Extremism program.
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The School of Education’s Theater of Translation project, now in its fifth year of serving local Title 1 high schools, presented its final shows on April 27-29, 2022. Nine UCI undergraduate students mentored the 20 advanced theater arts students from Tustin High School, helping the high-schoolers to both write and perform stories close to them regarding this year's theme of resilience. This year’s “Theater of Resilience: Engaging UCI Local Communities in Collaborative Writing and Performance” was funded with support of the UCI Office of Inclusive Excellence's Confronting Extremism program. The "Theater of Resilience" project was invited to present at the "Building Community to Confront Extremism" event hosted by the Office of Inclusive Excellence on May 12.
Research Associate and Director of the project Joseph Jenkins said, “Students in Title 1 high schools are caught, now more than ever, between different worlds. They need ways to figure out, who they are and who they want to be. But they’re wedged between conflicting unforgiving value systems, clashing race and gender norms, opposing class and faith beliefs." Writing can be effective in sorting through these kinds of challenges, Jenkins said, but too often schools present writing to students as a punishing chore. "It’s a rigid routine, with rules that almost always tell you you’re wrong, especially if you come from a different language background," he said. |
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This year, Jenkins and his team built a theater company, involving not only the theater class but also the undergrad mentors, close to them in age but already in college.
"We proposed to these 20 high-schoolers resilience as our guiding theme: how pro-social behaviors, engaging in communities, practicing generosity and caring, can help us to process, and actively resist, discriminations both systemic and intended, and other injustices," Jenkins said.
The final show staged this year followed fifteen weeks of uncertainty due to the COVID-19 pandemic. "The Tustin schools were open, its teachers front-line workers, but UCI was closed off and strictly online," Jenkins said. "I couldn’t require our undergrad mentors to go to the high school, so I went myself and orchestrated zoom calls—none of this ideal for a program supposed to begin with improv games to get to know each other.
"But we shouldered on and, by the final staging, we’d invented new ways to cohere as a troupe. In fact, our own struggle overlapped our writing theme—resilience from working together, facing obstacles. A small theater company, poor in material wealth, but rich in creative purpose and collaborative practice—is a great resilience-training place."
Professors Rossella Santagata and Gustavo Carlo, and Associate Professor of Comparative Literature Adriana Campos-Johnson were the other project team members.
View a PDF of the project here.
"We proposed to these 20 high-schoolers resilience as our guiding theme: how pro-social behaviors, engaging in communities, practicing generosity and caring, can help us to process, and actively resist, discriminations both systemic and intended, and other injustices," Jenkins said.
The final show staged this year followed fifteen weeks of uncertainty due to the COVID-19 pandemic. "The Tustin schools were open, its teachers front-line workers, but UCI was closed off and strictly online," Jenkins said. "I couldn’t require our undergrad mentors to go to the high school, so I went myself and orchestrated zoom calls—none of this ideal for a program supposed to begin with improv games to get to know each other.
"But we shouldered on and, by the final staging, we’d invented new ways to cohere as a troupe. In fact, our own struggle overlapped our writing theme—resilience from working together, facing obstacles. A small theater company, poor in material wealth, but rich in creative purpose and collaborative practice—is a great resilience-training place."
Professors Rossella Santagata and Gustavo Carlo, and Associate Professor of Comparative Literature Adriana Campos-Johnson were the other project team members.
View a PDF of the project here.
