A theater project situated within an Alternative to Incarceration Program (ATIP), the Insight Project provided a venue for youth to engage in storytelling and dramatic performance, and allowed for those stories to find diverse and interested audiences. For the young men and women involved, authoring occurred at multiple instances and in multiple…

This original account is based on the author's experiences with incarcerated girls participating in "Girl Time", a program created by a theatre company that conducts playwriting and performance workshops in youth detention centers. In addition to examining the lives of these and other formerly incarcerated girls, "Girl Time" shares the stories of…

The benefits of playwriting as a process for students are yet to be fully understood. While there is scarce research on playwriting pedagogy, the research that does exist suggests that playwriting provides several benefits for students relating to self-esteem, literacy and language development, as well as increased engagement in school and the…

In this article the author examines the lives of formerly incarcerated African American girls of ages 14-17 who participate in a playwriting and performance program in an urban southeastern American city and who consequently find themselves "betwixt and between" incarcerated and liberated lives. Through interviews with formerly incarcerated girls…

Devised work provides an opportunity for marginalized voices to be heard. Devised collaborative work has the flexibility to be successful with a small or large cast, actors of any age group, either with a traditional or a nontraditional student population. A devised ensemble play is typically based around a single theme or central concept. As with…

The centre of this article is a critical description of the development and production of "Everyday Theatre's" performed pretext, called "replay@timeout", including a detailed account of the devising process and the programme's content. The programme is located within the history and traditions both of theatre in education…

Inner-city public school classrooms, group homes, juvenile detention centers and facilities will be with Americans forever. Their populations can deflate, challenge, or improve any artist's skills and expertise. The author thinks of teaching artists who work these strenuous communities as soldiers of service, dedicated individuals who fight with…

In recent decades a number of Australian artists and teacher/artists have given serious attention to the creation of performance forms and performance engagement models that respect children's intelligence, engage with themes of relevance, avoid the cliches of children's theatre whilst connecting both sincerely and playfully with current…

This study examines the ways in which playwriting and performance provide tools for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated girls to prepare for their lives beyond detention centers and probation. In a three-year multi-sited ethnography journeying through regional youth detention centers (RYDCs), a multi-service center serving formerly incarcerated…

When children write plays, their wishes, fears, and secrets face an audience. An audience is not a do-gooder making nice. It is not an authority figure with a grudge against one's race or class. When it laughs at the jokes or applauds, it can be trusted. It is saying this play--and by extension its author--fits into the world on its own terms. In…

The author uses a screenplay form of experimental writing to enhance the sensory richness of her bilingual data. The author takes her academic prose and transforms it, using multilayered scenes to better portray both her and bilingual son's voices. Voices often squeak with conflict resulting mainly from differences in people's linguistic/cultural…

This paper aims to contribute to our understanding of how researchers and adult and continuing education scholars can work collectively with communities of adults. It illustrates the links between theory and practice in community-university engagement. The paper expands our understanding of the ways in which research data and arts-based activities…

Background: The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's (UWM) Urban Teacher World Pre-College Academy works with American high school students to explore what it means to be an educator in the urban context. High school students from underrepresented groups reside at the UWM campus to work with university faculty, staff and students to explore careers…

This article examines relationships among process, product, and playmaking in a southeastern playwriting and performance program for teen girls, Playmaking for Girls (PFG). The authors have chosen to focus on tensions between process and product. Such tensions are present in the challenges teachers experience when privileging student-centered…

Sharing research findings with others is a fundamental concern of researchers. Qualitative research results may be disseminated in conventional (e.g., scholarly text or presentation) or innovative (e.g., art, drama, or poetry) forms. Given that researchers should select the best form of presentation of their work, it is worthwhile to explore…