Who needs a book called “Why Theatre Education Matters?”
One of the things I've learned is that as the author of a book you don't actually get to pick the title of a book! Anyone who's ever written a book knows this quite well, but this was a new thing that I learned in this process.
The thing about titles is that they are meant to reflect what the book is and what the book says but they don't necessarily reflect who the book is for - so you may be looking at a title like “Why Theater Education Matters: Understanding its Cognitive, Social, and Emotional Benefits” and wonder - is this book for me?
My goals in writing this book were to make a widely accessible, widely applicable, in depth exploration of theater and acting (as well as talk about the Thinking on Stage study and its connections to psychological development). This book is not just for arts advocates and not just for scholars of theater education. My hope is that it can be used and appreciated much broadly – by actors and students of acting, by theatre teachers, arts education policy makers, and anyone who loves theatre and the arts for our children and ourselves.
If you are a scholar of theater education my hope is that this book will serve as an interdisciplinary look into the psychology behind many of the areas of theater education scholars have been talking about for many years. If you are interested in any one of the topics in any more depth I have provided extensive references to do deep dives into psychological areas of research such as identity development, empathy development, playfulness after early childhood, and creativity.
If you are an arts advocate, my hope is that this book provides a very clear road map for different ways to advocate for the inclusion of acting classes and theater education across school levels and types. I have very much attempted to blend discussions of theater education as they are connected to and transferred to skills that everyone thinks is important, such as collaboration and communication, while also giving weight and depth to the authenticity of theater education as it actually exists on the ground and not simply in service of some other kind of outcome.
But why stop there? If you are an educator in any other topic or art form my hope is that this book will provide for you some ideas about how to integrate and use theater exercises in other forms of curriculum, and other types of classrooms. If you want to think about how to increase playfulness and the release of inhibitions in your classroom there are nine different exercises discussed in the book that I think center and focus on enhancing playfulness in a group of students. Educators can take and use these creatively for their own topics in order to look for this specific outcome.
If you are a theater teacher or an actor my hope is that this book will give you language and structure to the psychology of the things that are already deeply known in acting practice and deeply known in the acting classroom. Because of the diversity of schools and students that I worked with, and my many years of research on theatre and acting from sociodramatic play in preschoolers all the way up through professionals working on high level theater projects, the types of logical skills that I found across classroom I hypothesize are broadly applicable across age level and group. So this book gives language and connection to what a practicing actor already knows about their process and practice of creating a character.
And finally, if you're just generally interested in the arts in education in social and emotional learning in positive youth development or in adolescent development this book is deeply connected across all of those different fields, to explain how these kinds of theater experiences could become social and emotional learning opportunities, creative curriculum possibilities and general positive psychological experiences.
So don't let the title fool you. The book is about why theatre education matters for students, and the book is about understanding the social emotional and cognitive benefits of being engaged in theater. But as I say in the preface artists, actors, and educators claiming theater can change the world. But how? In the book I show how theatre is the ultimate flexible toolkit for a wide range of positive outcomes, across type of student level of class context and population.
On a final note. This book is also for anyone who's interested in interdisciplinarity. There is always a tension when you bring two fields together - particularly fields that operate on different assumptions. Theater operates on the assumption that every individual story is just that: an individual story which may reveal deeper truths. But that's up to the interpretation of the actor, and audience.
Psychology searches for so-called universal truths. There's been a lot of reckoning in psychology recently around individual differences, context, and community based knowledge. But psychology as a science is really in search of what it can know across time, place, and person. My book attempts to be both individualized in the way in which it approaches the psychology of acting but also looking for elements that can be seen across all of the different contexts. More on this to come much later, but interdisciplinarity will be at the heart of a very fun event happening on January 25th, in Washington DC at Politics and Prose. More on that to come!
Why Theatre Education Matters is available at all major online retailers including bookshop.org, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon.com as well as on Teacher's College Press. If you're interested in a group or bulk order please contact me through ThaliaGoldstein.com and I can help arrange!