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=To Thine Own Self Be True= Engaging in performance/theatre work with students in English/Language Arts Classrooms

Introduction
The purpose of this wiki is to provide support for pre-service and/or current teachers who want to use drama in their middle school or high school English classrooms but may lack experience or confidence. This wiki provides lesson and unit plans, resources including videos, podcasts, and links to arts-based organizations in order to support your work. The wiki also includes questions from pre-service and current teachers as well as responses from me. The wiki provides insights into the major benefits and challenges in engaging in theater work as part of the English curriculum.

//My Story//
My name is Betsy Ferrer. I began teaching middle school English in Atlanta, GA in 2001. In high school, I acted in plays, but I had no formal theatre training. I simply felt that if students didn't perform Shakespeare, they would lose the central purposes of the plays. Therefore, I decided we would act the play out in front of family and friends at school. Initially this was a simple endeavor. We had no budget. I spent my own money scrounging thrift stores for suitable costumes. In 2004 I moved to Seattle and kept performing the plays with my class. I wrote a grant and was fortunate to receive funding from [|The Fulcrum Foundation]. For the first time we were able to perform the play in a real theatre with actual costumes and sets. The key to the whole project is **student choice**, **engagement,** and **involvement**. The students bring so much to each production. Every year our productions became more involved as new groups of students brought new ideas, energy, and enthusiasm. I want to emphasize that you do not need to have official training in order to engage in this work. You will learn so much along the way and in a true constructivist model, you will learn along with and from your students.

In engaging in this work with students, I always use three guidelines: **respect the word, be evocative, and everybody plays.** These guidelines are also useful in thinking about how to use this wiki. We hope you respect what we have to say here, but we also hope that you will go beyond our words and add your own stories and experiences. This will also help you to be evocative! Elicit excitement in your students and also this broader community of educators who care deeply about the arts and their place in the classroom. Finally, theatre works best when everybody plays! Everyone has something to add and contribute, and we all grow from this exchange.