Documentary Theatre: A springboard for empathy, justice, and creativity in the classroom

Growing up in a region fueled by agriculture and crazed by athletics, the performing arts were what helped me make sense of my youth. In my small town in Kentucky, a rural Appalachian farming town, the local arts center was my haven. It was there, in my first plays and musicals, that I began to experience a deep sense of empathy and understanding. From the war-torn lives of jews in Nazi Germany to the segregated streets of Baltimore, embodying character helped me to understand people different from me and, more importantly, what we have in common. For young people, emotional responses to adversity, pain, and otherness are limited to the experiences an individual has in their own life. That is why I have dedicated my life to using drama as a form of empathy in education.

Developing an Idea

Stemming from the work of the actress, playwright, educator, and MacArthur Fellow Anna Deavere Smith (whose class I had been lucky enough to take during her visit to Washington, DC), my process utilizes documentary theatre as a tool for empathy in the classroom and can open the door to other curricular connections. Through the use of one-on-one interviews, my work has been based on the performance of a partner’s answers to a set of questions. While this naturally creates a space for empathy-building, I had long hoped to strengthen the practice and disseminate these resources in a manageable, teacher-friendly manner. This approach to storytelling also integrates arts-based learning, which is an added bonus for schools looking to implement creativity across their curriculum. The Documentary Theatre strategy is broken into three main parts: Interview, Performance and Discussion/Reflection. Each interview consists of a question that acts as a springboard for a deeply interpersonal story, which acts as a verbatim script for a performance. Participants are also tasked with watching body language, noticing habits or gestures, and listening to vocal inflection. In my experience, it has been amazing to watch students discover differences and similarities between themselves and their peers, and have the chance to perform a short “monologue” of their partner. There is nothing quite like the full commitment and dedication it takes to embody another person.

Flash forward to 2019: I am a graduate student at Harvard Graduate School of Education. Amid the flurry of topics I am studying, my core focus lies at the intersection of theatre, pedagogy, and social justice. I come across a program called Making Caring Common (MCC), an initiative created to equip young people with the tools to act with empathy, stand for fairness and justice, and strive to contribute to a more caring society. Each year, MCC offers grants for graduate students who propose new strategies, then guides them through the revision process and offers students with promising proposals a pilot phase in their Caring Schools Network, a collection of schools who participate in daily or weekly empathy-based education. I noticed that many of the existing strategies used by the Making Caring Common program utilized interviews or narratives in some way, but my lessons had a uniquely artistic component that amplifies student voice, allows for complete physical, vocal, and emotional embodiment of “the other,” and gives students full autonomy to manage their own project. I felt this was an excellent opportunity to fine-tune my materials, and essentially mass-produce the use of documentary theatre in the classroom.

Testing A Theory

As we moved into the pilot phase, my team and I were already aware of the research that clearly demonstrates the effectiveness of these types of endeavors: there is widespread evidence that integrating elements of theatre into the K12 classroom is useful for creating empathy, compassion, a desire for social justice, and a spirit of civic engagement. Students engaged in play-building learn conflict resolution skills, greater respect for peers, and how to listen to multiple points of view. (International Journal of Education & the Arts, 2006). It was also found that high school students engaged in some type of acting training develop a higher level of empathy, heightened understanding of what others are thinking and feeling, and are better able to control their own positive and negative emotions (Mind, Brain, and Education, 2011). Still, the use of drama in education where this deep sense of empathy is generated has largely been limited to students who are part of extracurricular activities that happen outside normal school hours. This limits access to marginalized students who might benefit the most from these experiences, but cannot attend after school programs, or those who attend schools that do not have a regular drama class with a drama specialist. These realities were especially striking when looking at communities of color; in 2008, African American and Hispanic students received less than half the access to creative learning experiences as white students. Since the lesson scaffolding would lend it to be used in homerooms, non-arts classrooms, and after school programming, this strategy would provide a ground-level entry point for both students and classroom teachers to implement empathy and inclusion in the form of a light lift creative drama experience.

Furthermore, It is important to note that very little research exists, if any, regarding documentary theatre used specifically as a tool in arts or non-arts classrooms. In my extensive research on the topic, I couldn’t find anything more than personal anecdotes from colleagues and acquaintances—stories of passionate drama teachers introducing Anna Deavere Smith in their drama classroom, or memorable performances of self-written monologues by students.

As the pilot phase continues, the initial findings have been stellar. One of the major fears in the planning process was that students might use their performance to mock or misrepresent a peer’s voice. The results were exactly the opposite; students were surprisingly gentle with deeply personal narratives from their classmates. Many students who were collectively perceived as “class bullies” engaged positively and honored the stories presented by their partners. Typically quiet students spoke out when it was their turn to perform the narrative of their partner. Often shy when digging into a more vulnerable place, these young people were boldly (and almost instantly) opening up about triumphs, challenges, and heartaches. We are still trying to pull apart these threads to find why the results might play out in this overwhelmingly positive manner, but one thing seems clear: there is some sort of secret sauce in the moment when a student is authentically embodying the life experiences of someone else while still fully being present in their own understanding of the world around them. In a time when our nation is deeply divided, this might be the closest thing to “walking a mile in their shoes” as we can get.

What’s Next?

Since piloting the empathy-focused strategy at Harvard, I have offered tweaked versions of my Documentary Theatre lessons to be included in several other programs internationally, expanding the reach of this empowering narrative-focused dramatic approach to students in various backgrounds and levels of experience with theatre. From professional acting conservatories in Washington, DC to summer camps in China and India, the results are consistently surprising and encouraging. As an actor, educator, scholar, and activist, I’ve learned that one of the best forms of social justice is empowering youth to use their own voice and helping them recognize the power in ceding their narrative to someone who is very different from them. In the words of Maya Angelou, “We can learn to see each other—and see ourselves in each other—and recognize that human beings are more alike than we are unalike.”