Shaping Lives Through Theatre Education

To see the faces of children light up when they step on stage is to see the growth of self-confidence they will take with them forever.

Since 1929, the Educational Theatre Association (home of the International Thespian Society) has encouraged that emotional, intellectual, and artistic growth. Theatre teaches accountability, respect, teamwork, discipline, risk-taking, and creativity in ways that cannot be learned anywhere else. It encourages critical skills that promote the physical, moral, and intellectual development of well-rounded students. Theatre also provides a home where students can feel accepted, valued, and part of something larger than themselves — some for the first time in their lives.

As Tony nominee Stephanie D’Abruzzo of Avenue Q said, “My Thespian experience shaped my life. … All of it helped me become the actor I am today. But more than that, all of it helped me become the person I am today.”

EdTA began as an honorary organization for high school theatre students. It inducted its first middle school students in 1990 and welcomed its two-millionth member in 2009. Today, the association has about 100,000 active student and professional members at more than 5,000 schools, the largest network of theatre educators in the nation.

Theatre programs around the country face impoverishment and even elimination without sustained support. Many teachers rely on EdTA for access to tools and opportunities that they and their students would not have otherwise. The resources the association provides include an online Theatre Education Community forum for educators to share knowledge and best practices, the monthly Dramatics magazine for students and quarterly Teaching Theatre for teachers, as well as an annual international student festival and national teacher conference.

The association has also been a leader in advocacy, helping to draft the first theatre guidelines in the National Core Arts Standards. In the past year, EdTA has seen that work bear fruit, with nine states establishing new theatre standards. Other highlights in 2015 were the establishment of a chapter in China and the creation of JumpStart Theatre, a program to introduce musical theatre into schools that have had no performing arts program.

Beyond these major initiatives, EdTA continued to strengthen its core programs, seeing a record 3,762 attendees at its weeklong International Thespian Festival — where nearly 800 students auditioned for colleges and for scholarship programs totaling $169,050 — and about 50,000 students at one of its 42 state festivals. And the association is on track to break those records in 2016.

“We have a lot of untapped potential,” says EdTA Executive Director Julie Cohen Theobald. “In some schools, everybody is involved in the theatre program and the whole community is behind it. … And then there are other schools where it’s this tiny thing in the corner, if it exists at all. I would love to see the majority of schools have thriving theatre programs, starting with high schools and then working our way down to the lower levels.”

For more information, visit EdTa’s website or follow @schooltheatre and @julieedta on Twitter.