Preparing a general issue of Youth Theatre Journal is like a cooking challenge I love. The task? At someone else’s home, prepare dinner with whatever is already there. No grocery run. No borrowed ingredient. No smuggled spice. It is always more fun in someone else’s kitchen. The same dynamic occurs in editing a general issue. Youth Theatre Journal flings the doors wide… and authors generously stock our shelves with their work. This work was not created to fit in a particular issue or feed a certain theme. Rather, it is a reflection of what the authors offer as important and relevant and worthy. General issues are a smorgasbord. Sometimes, the issue becomes an array of appetizers that allow readers to sample widely across methodologies and orientations and questions and theoretical frames. Other times, the issue showcases variations on theme… the academic equivalent to a spread of omelets, deviled eggs, quiche, egg salad, and soufflés. Sometimes, as with this issue, it’s a delightful gumbo… a mixture of ingredients and influences from all sorts of global corners that, when combined just so, creates something that both warms and feeds us, but also represents beautifully our contested living histories.
The broadening range of what-counts-as-youth is enlivened in Ben Fletcher-Watson and Gustave Weltesek’s writings. Fletcher-Watson offers a sequel to his 2013 YTJ piece, continuing development toward a “coherent theory of Theatre in the Early Years” (TEY). Chronicling a two-year grounded theory study, Fletcher-Watson paints a vivid picture of TEY in Scotland in the voices and perspectives of 26 TEY practitioners to forward a dramaturgical model of TEY as a form continually navigating tensions between equality and integrity. At the other end of the richly widening “youth” spectrum, Gus Weltsek reflects on the intersection of race, agency, and the embodiment of change in a university-student theatre group called the Emergent Theatre Project. Weltsek centers the work with youth clearly, but focuses on a brave critical analysis of his own morphing race-based identity, catalyzed by and feeding back into contested conceptions of social-justice theatre/drama work with youth.
Several pieces link to classic drama/theatre efforts in schools with teachers and students, yet also interrogate the multitude of ways theatre/drama finds its way into the K–12 classroom, reinforcing that “how” matters. Jo Beth Gonzalez, a scholar and veteran high school theatre teacher, shares a reflective analysis fostering intentional wakefulness in her high school theatre ensembles. This orientation, at once reminiscent and immediate, leans into articulating ephemeral aspects of theatre work in a high-school setting over several years. Folding in and leaning on ideas from an eclectic range of fields, Gonzalez distills her findings into four categories: breath, stillness, community, and presence. The Peter Duffy-Beth Powers article examines drama/theatre’s role in general pre-service teacher preparation across disciplines. The authors describe the power, problems, and possibilities of employing Theatre of the Oppressed as a tool and heuristic for articulating and considering critical perspectives in a teacher preparation process that is increasingly expected to be standardized, compliant and apolitical, while serving young people in need of cultural relevance and dynamic inclusivity.
A professional development focus connects the work of Jamie Simpson Steele with that of Kathryn Dawson, Caitlin Deckard, Stephanie Cawthon, and Hayley Loblein. Simpson Steele’s article provides a layered description of teaching artist perceptions of their own professional development trajectories. Tapping voices from multiple art forms and experience levels across Hawai’i, Simpson Steele aims to advance the professional identity of teaching artists, inform the choices of professional development providers, and engage teaching artists “as agents in their own development.” Kathryn Dawson and her co-authors share a qualitative analysis of the reflective tools employed in a two-week drama-based-learning professional development workshop with practicing classroom teachers. This research team sheds light on operationalizing reflexive practices with teachers inquiring into classroom drama work within the “complex ecosystem of factors” that comprise teacher realities.
While each piece makes its unique mark, the collection is bound together with threads of self study, a tenacity to connect with practice, and a generosity to risk and question urgently. It may well be that in this electronic era, only the editorial team will experience these pieces as a unit, a gumbo of nuanced networks, healthy tensions, and echoes. I can only hope that readers might opt to share in a hearty cover-to-cover helping.
Beth Murray
YTJ