Through my years as an artist, I’ve learned that what has been most important is the process. What I mean by process is the actual creating of the art or the becoming of an artist. It is the process itself that I have learned to enjoy the most, but have found to be the most challenging. The process is what I have also been frustrated with because it has sometimes not gone as quickly as I had hoped. It is the process that has intimidated me, but that has also stimulated me. My love of art has been felt not only in the product, but in discovering in the process. My journey of discovering myself as an artist, teacher, and human being will be a life long process. This I have accepted and embraced. This is at the heart of my mission as a drama teacher.

As a prospective drama teacher in academia, my first pedagogical models have been from my professors (and from all the teachers I have had throughout my lifetime in school). The first thing that I notice that they all had in common was their attitude towards the theatre. All of them revered the theatre as a form of great art, particularly the art and craft of acting. While I share in this awe and admiration for the theatre, I sometimes found that the attitude towards acting was that it was a sacred, untouchable art. That only the special or lucky are worthy to call themselves actors. It is my mission to do the opposite- to teach acting as a touchable, tangible, exhilarating art. In order for student actors to create and experience theatre, they need to be able to be intimate with the work and their ensemble. For a student or any actor to express vulnerability with an audience, a feeling of safety is absolutely essential first and foremost in the rehearsal process. As a teacher of the arts, it is my main responsibility to establish an atmosphere and feeling of safety and respect for both my students and myself. This requires setting the ground rules for giving and receiving criticism, encouraging support and respect when a student is opening up themselves in performance.

In Tony Mantanaro’s Mime Spoken Here: The Performers Portable Workshop, he provides detailed exercises that help the performer "get out of there own heads" by doing abstract, eclectic movements quickly and spontaneously. With every student doing this in front of each other, there is no time for someone to feel embarrassed or awkward. This kind of work has helped me tremendously as a student actor, which brings me to my next point in my mission statement: To encourage my students to "know thyself". Being a great actor (or human being) requires that you know who you are and what your capable of. To truly empathize with another person, you have to understand yourself and relate what you have been through with their life. Playing a character requires understanding their life, feelings, attitudes, and perspectives. If you can not understand why someone would ever kill someone, you will never be a convincing murderer. Even if you aren’t a criminal (hopefully not), your understanding of the motives, feelings of rage and disappointment that the character goes through are what’s essential to playing him or her. If you have never experienced any disappointment in life (or do not know how to recall it), you also won’t ever be a believable actor. The best thing an artist or performer can do is to live their life fully without being afraid to feel even the uncomfortable things that no one likes to talk about. In Julia Cameron’s The Right to Write, she stresses the importance of letting your art and life flow together naturally. Writing (or any other act of art) should be done like breathing, not like some holy task that required all the planets to be aligned in just the right way for it to be good. I hope to give my students tools that will build up their self esteem and each other’s, to be confident in life no matter what situation or occupation they are in.

To be able to reflect on and assess yourself with a compassion is a skill to be learned in itself, but is a strategy that will ultimately stimulate growth within students. A drama teacher’s opinion should not be the be all end all of a student’s work. I am a firm believer that the teacher should be the king or queen, speaking down to students from the throne. I believe in comradeship between teachers and students, that there be a sense of good moral towards the artistic work and each other for creating a successful ensemble and theatrical experience for everyone. Tony Montanaro expresses that every student should learn to feel what is working or not with an audience within themselves. He uses examples of playing a convincing animal. When he or his students felt their animal’s emotions, the physical movements emerged in a natural and believable way. It is an important practice for "the real world" for a student to be able to gage where they are within themselves; and to take the initiative to go to where they would like to be.

Just as I expect my students to learn to assess themselves effectively, they can expect me to assess them fairly and honestly. I think it’s important to not just assess a student solely on their achievements, but on their overall growth. A teacher should understand where each individual student is mentally along with their talent, work ethic, and artistic capability. Assessment in the arts should be given in consideration to a student’s individual growth, not on a finished product or class curve. In a classroom situation where there may be many levels of experience and skill, a teacher needs to identify realistic goals for the class as a whole, and hopefully for individual students as well. I realize that this may be challenging because of time, but it is something that I feel makes an excellent teacher, and really encourages a student. A teacher may consider having other teaching artists come in to assist their students by offering outside professional feedback that may not be possible with just one teacher.

As a teacher, I have to be open to receiving feedback from the administration and my colleagues. It may help to have colleagues observe my lessons in action, to help me hone in on what works well with the students and what doesn’t.

I believe a teacher of the arts should stimulate creativity and growth within his or her students. He or she should be able to identify if a student wants to grow, what are some possible inhibitors, and what is a student’s artistic potential is. ArtConnection’s Carol Morgan in her essay Toward an Educational Philosophy talks about the "unique artistic perspectives" that teaching artists bring into the classroom:

Like the classroom teacher, teaching artists respect their students and meet them at their levels of skills, knowledge, ability, and understanding. Teaching artists help students to experience the joy of learning in and through the arts. Teaching artists and classroom teachers work collaboratively to develop a learning environment that will nurture creativity and curiosity. They engage in a continuous process of reflection and assessment of student work to inform their teaching practices and enhance student learning.

The drama teacher needs to be able to collaborate with the faculty and administration to create the most effective curriculum possible for students to achieve both artistic and scholarly excellence. As seen in Lisa Belkin’s New York Times article The School Lunch Test, change is possible through perseverance and standing your ground. In the article, Agatston Research Foundation hoped to make a difference in the eating habits of school children. Through implementing a program where a nutritionist would educate the school children about good nutrition in the lunch room, children were actually educating their parents on what is food that is good for you and what is not good for you. Although change was slow in the school system, slowly, but surely the lunch menus improved significantly. People responded to solid persistence. Support was given to a rightful cause. The same can be done in schools in regards to theatre and the arts. I commit to standing my ground as an arts educator. I completely agree with Carol Morgan’s philosophy that "participating in the arts through a practice of inquiry and discovery provides students with kinesthetic, cognitive, affective and aesthetic experience that is essential to human development… Through the arts, students learn to reflect critically, going beyond the technical skills of simple craft to building the foundation to their own aesthetic based on their perceptions and interpretations of their experience."

Finally, I believe that everyone has the ability to be creative. In a sense, everyone is an artist. Art, theatre, or acting should not be exclusive and selective to the fine few. As Julia Cameron says, everyone has the right to write. Creativity is a need, a human innate behavior that should be encouraged and nurtured like a baby in a womb. The creative soul is fragile, but has the potential to become very strong. The process of learning to create can be a long road, with many fulfilling pit stops that eventually lead you to the most rewarding destination: a better understanding of yourself and others.

Belkin, Lisa. "The School Lunch Test." New York Times Magazine. 20 Aug. 2006.

Cameron, Julia. The Right to Write: An Invitation to the Writing Life. New York: Penguin Putnam, 1998

Montanaro, Tony. Mime Spoken Here: The Performers Portable Workshop. Maine: Tilbury House, 1995.

Morgan, Carol. "Toward an Educational Philosophy." chapter 1 in ArtsConnection.