As theatre educators face increasing pressure surrounding the shows and topics they introduce on the stage and in the classroom, knowing how to approach “problematic” materials is becoming critically important. At the 2024 Theatre Education Conference (TEC), Josh Streeter’s session, “Finding the Power to Liberate the Curriculum: Culturally and Historically Responsive Teaching and Learning,” explores how educators in the Connected Arts Network (CAN) are leveraging Gholdy Muhammad’s Unearthing Joy to re-evaluate their curricula and teaching practices.
EdTA caught up with him to learn more about the strategies they’re using and how educators everywhere can tackle the materials they find important in their classroom.
Gholdy Muhammad’s Pursuits for Unearthing Joy
A follow-up to her book Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework, Gholdy Muhammad’s Unearthing Joy focuses on providing educators with strategies to take more control over their curriculum while still remaining culturally and historically responsible.
The framework outlines five pursuits—identity, skills, intellect, criticality, and joy—as a lens through which educators can create learning opportunities for students, particularly when tackling historically challenged materials.
“Teachers don’t have a lot of power, but we do control the curriculum we create as educators. We also control how we teach something and think about the supplementary resources we want to use,” Streeter says. “What I’ve seen as I’ve been working with teachers using the five pursuits is they find both a joy and passion in their teaching, but also it’s helping support students.”
A Deep Dive
While the TEC session will explore all five pursuits, three that Streeter has found particularly helpful for educators include the following, which are often less well-known:
1. Intellect
In your curriculum, you’re likely focused on providing students with the skills and knowledge needed to explore and participate in theatre, including artists, methodologies, or productions. However, that doesn’t always include the cultural knowledge and background to contextualize them.
Streeter points to Augusto Boal as an example. Many theatre classrooms explore concepts Boal utilized or invented, such as Theatre of the Oppressed or tableau, but not Boal as a person or his influences. “It’s not just about intellect as knowledge, but equipping students and helping teachers,” says Streeter. “Who are those thought leaders we need to [introduce] and teach holistically about so students feel they’re both inspired and seeing themselves as agents of change.”
2. Criticality
The same way context is needed to understand the artists shaping theatre, it’s also needed to understand the systems influencing the world those materials live in.
“Criticality is really sitting and looking at systems of oppression that are institutionalized,” he says. “The justice system, healthcare system, education system, which then bleed into any “ism,” – classism, racism, ableism; getting students to think about systems of oppression in their localized community.”
What are some of the words or biases that perpetuate these systems of oppression? Do these systems exist in the world of the production you’re exploring, and how do they impact the characters? How can students have more empathy or connect these concepts to their lived experiences?
All these questions can help educators provide more depth and move beyond avoiding materials solely because they’re “problematic.” Dr. Jo Beth Gonzalez (2013) identifies these as opportunities to find “pockets of critical inquiry” in a production process.
3. Joy
Of course, educators want students to enjoy theatre and have fun in class, but the process of culturally and historically responsive teaching may not always be “fun.”
“It’s not about a student’s experience in a classroom being tied to whether they like or don’t like theatre class or the teacher,” says Streeter, “but what they’ve achieved through the theatre process.”
Additionally, every student’s definition of joy is different. Making the theatre classroom a place where you can work through tough discussions, connect your source material to relatable influencers and content, and explore student voice, creates those opportunities for joy.
Where Do You Begin?
So what does applying the pursuits to your curriculum look like in practice? Streeter recognizes that implementing any of them is truly a journey that can take considerable time to achieve. However, there are a few different ways theatre educators can begin making strides in liberating their curriculum.
- Plan Units Over Individual Lessons: As Streeter points out, Muhammad’s work “is really operationalizing and focusing on unit-planning, not single lesson plans.” This allows educators the flexibility to blend the pursuits across multiple lessons within a unit and find opportunities to dive deeper into specific historical context and information.
- Leverage Multimedia Resources: Expanding intellect means introducing students to as much contextual knowledge as possible—but that isn’t limited to theatre or documents. Multimedia, including TED Talks, documentaries, podcasts, and other art forms can help educators illustrate key connections. “Rather than just saying, ‘What can we find in education or theatre?,’ ask yourself ‘What can we learn from poetry? What can we borrow from visual art?’” says Streeter.
- Find Your Community: Implementing the five pursuits can be daunting, especially for educators who are new to the framework or the profession, which is why Streeter emphasizes the importance of collaboration. Whether it’s a PLC or fellow educators in the school, a collaborative approach “can help teachers feel more supported and confident as they experiment with the framework in the classroom.”
Although the CAN educators are still working through the process themselves, Streeter notes that focusing on culturally and historically responsive teaching has been an exciting experience.
“The framework allows us to both see value and critically analyze the work, and both of those can be done at the same time. Someone may say, ‘I love Shakespeare,’ and someone else may say, ‘I really struggle to understand Shakespeare and therefore I hate it,’ and both of those are valid,” says Streeter. “We want students to have an informed context and to know how they feel about it. This is hopefully moving away from the binary black/white, wrong/right model, to something that feels a little bit more holistic and authentic because those are the kinds of ways we want to move in the real world too.”
