Attending Face to Face
Brigid Warnke
Over spring break, I was fortunate
enough to attend Face to Face, a conference put together by the New York City
Arts in Education Roundtable at CCNY.
I’d been looking forward to the opportunity to meet and learn from other
theatre teachers and teaching artists since the beginning of the semester. I teach theatre and music at a small special
education school, and because I teach both, I am the entire performing arts
department. I’m also a first-year
teacher. It’s pretty intimidating and
can be rather isolating, so I was thrilled to have this opportunity to connect
with others in the field and see what kind of work they were doing. But as thrilled as I was, I could never have
imagined just how inspiring this conference would be.
One of the
sessions I attended on the first day was called In Full Color: Cultivating a New Generation of Leaders in the Field of
Arts Education, a panel discussion involving James Miles and Michael
Wiggins of Urban Arts Partnership, Courtney J. Boddie of The New Victory Theatre,
and moderated by CCNY’s own Sobha Kavanakudiyil. This panel set out to address the question,
“Why doesn’t the make-up of our non-profit leadership more accurately reflect
the demographics of the populations arts educators serve and how can we achieve
more diversity?” While this panel was
set up mainly to discuss non-profit organizations, I attended because the same
lack of diversity exists among school teachers and administrators; a lack of
diversity that persists even as public schools are now serving a student body
that is majority students of color. As
a white teacher of primarily African-American and Hispanic students in the
Bronx, I am part of this trend. I wanted
to hear from others why they think this lack of diversity exists, what steps we
can take as a community of arts educators to combat this and finally, as a
person who is passionate about achieving equity in our non-profit and school
leadership, but whose presence in those spaces symbolizes a lack of equity,
what is my role in this conversation?
What can I do?
Well not to worry, because in the
90-minute panel discussion we totally answered all of my questions and solved
all of these problems. (Kidding, but
wouldn’t that be nice?) As one might
expect, the energy in the room was tense, as conversations about racial equity
frequently are. The further we delved
into the question, the more obstacles we uncovered; again, not an uncommon
theme in these kinds of conversations.
But Sobha and the panelists did an excellent job of making us focus not
just on the problem, but on action steps that we as teachers, teaching artists
and administrators can take to combat the problem. I was reminded that while this issue is
incredibly complex, some of the action steps I can take as teacher are so simple,
like teaching theatre and music history in a way that emphasizes the rich
artistic contributions of people of color, or making a conscious effort to
bring in guest artists of color to work with my students, because, as James
Miles reminded us, it is important for all students to see people who look like
them in positions of leadership and authority.
Another panel I attended that gave
me some concrete ideas that I’m excited to implement in my classroom was Mixing the Digital and Drama: Making
Performance-Based Online Maps. This
workshop came from a partnership between the New York City Department of
Education and C&T, a UK-based applied theatre company that focuses on
mixing drama with digital technologies.
They showed us an application they developed called Stratar that allows
students to create their own interactive online maps. As I was watching their presentation, I was
frantically scribbling reminders to myself to talk to the computer teacher
about working together on a project like this.
This workshop made the possibilities of a cross-curricular project
between computers and theatre seem endless- why had I never thought of it
before? Apparently I’m not the only one
who missed this boat- when asked what other organizations are doing work like
this, the guys from C&T exchanged a smile and simply said, “No one.” Well C&T, The New LIFE School will take
that challenge! The computer teacher and
I are planning a trip along The South Bronx Culture Trail, a map of significant
places in hip-hop history created by a non-profit in the neighborhood. We’re going to have the students prepare
performances to be recorded at some of the sites and try to create our own
interactive version of The South Bronx Culture Trail.
Overall, Face to Face was a
wonderful, thought-provoking, exhilarating and exhausting two days. I wish I could write about all of the
sessions I attended, but that would be less of a blog post and more of a book,
so I’ll just say thank you to all of the presenters for sharing your work. I look forward to doing this all again next
year!
