This path explores my experiences at Los Angeles High School of the arts and the incredible wealth of information I've learned from the students there. 

A large component included in the master’s program I attended was a 9 month internship. (Click here for more information about the MA in Applied Theatre Arts program at University of Southern California.) For my internship, I chose to work with the 12th grade acting class at LAHSA, where their teacher, the amazing Ms. Annie Simmons, decided to introduce theatre for social change as an ending to their four year acting class. 

While the name “Los Angeles High School of the Arts” may sound like a fancy audition-only private school, it certainly is not. Yes, there are a few students who intend to pursue a career in the performing arts but most students end up there for various reasons other than its focus on arts. This pilot school uses performing arts as an interdisciplinary and linking component to what are usually considered core classes (English, Math, etc.). Early in my internship, I wrote a paper about the context of my site. To read that paper and find out more about LAHSA, its demographics, statistics, and teaching models, click here. 

In this project, I will mostly focus on the students with whom I worked - Ms. Simmons’ 12th grade class, particularly the 18 students who chose to focus on Applied Theatre Arts for the second semester. Kieran, a fellow classmate of mine who I partnered with in this internship, and I taught and learned alongside this amazing group of youth. During the second semester, Kieran and I were at LAHSA 2-3 days/week where we taught a 2 hour class and were able to implement what we learned during our own classes in real life. 

The nature of both schools - LAHSA and USC’s ATA program - required us to cater our curriculum to meet certain standards, dates, etc. and to include a culminating performance “product” to represent the process of what we worked on. Both the daily teaching and the performances/open rehearsals (small and large, throughout the semester) allowed us to practice our jokering skills. ‘Joker’ is a term created by Augusto Boal, “founder” of Theatre of the Oppressed, which essentially means facilitator who asks difficult questions and guides a group through a potentially challenging task. 

Kieran and I knew that by the end of the semester we would need to create a play/performance with the students about the challenges their community faces so we could all experiment and rehearse potential ways to end those problems. A challenge of this site, versus some other internship sites with organized activist groups, was that this community was established not necessarily by choice (they must attend high school) and therefore there wasn’t one clear problem they all faced which they wanted to conquer. Therefore, Kieran and I knew the first step with this group was to get to know them, help them get to know each other better, and ask questions to explore their surroundings and develop their critical consciousness. 

As I spent more time with the students, I was reminded of a serious problem I see in our current education system - the systemic silenced student - and wondered what we could do to begin combatting it. 

1. The Systemic Silenced Student
2. Establishing ground rules
3. Self - Group - Community
4. Self
5. Group
6. Community
7. Our Final Show - ‘The American Dream?’ - A theatrical dialogue
8. Evaluation
9. Saying goodbye - Ritual and plans for the future