Open Forum

Our department has been dealing with this for a few years now, especially as student attitudes have changed. To be up front, I teach technical classes and don't deal with it directly, but I have very strong opinions. If we only ever explore or expose our students to scripts that we have only a direct understanding of, we will never grow. They will never grow. And there is way more to script analysis than the actual events in a story. There is structure, flow, timing of character introduction, rising action, etc. Things that you ARE expert in. I think its a great opportunity for students of other cultures to step up and be leaders in a classroom. An opportunity for us as educators to reach out and bring guest artists and other teachers into our world to team teach (the approach we use most often). I think the evolving attitudes toward teaching materials from other cultures is fantastic and causes us, and our students, to ask a lot if very important questions. Because it is so important for us and to our students from other cultures, we need to find ways to teach those stories and bring multiple voices and perspectives into the conversation. 

That's my take. 

Emily,

Thanks so much for your words here. I really appreciate what you have written. 

For probably 15 years, I have this phrase posted front and center, " Everyone is a student. Everyone is a teacher." I have many people who immediately get it, but I have been questioned by fellow teachers, administrators, parents, and teachers at times about the concept.  I can explain the idea pretty well, and I strive to model it daily, but still there are some educators who don't get it. 

The next time I encounter a challenge to my "Everyone a student/Everyone a teacher" practice, I plan to use your phrase , "if you align yourself alongside the students as a listener and a learner…". It is beautiful and insightful. 

I am so happy you shared. 

thank you!

Dear Ms. Lustig, 

Your survey respondent raises an interesting point – the always unique and singular perspective each of us has when hearing a story, a historical fact, a work of art. And then trying to interpret what that story, fact, work "means" to us and to the audience of unique and singular individuals hearing it.

But your respondent is incorrect when suggesting *only* a teacher representing a specific demographic should be allowed to bring this play to the class and utilize it as a teaching tool. That's not how education works.

What gives this play its true and lasting value is its Universality - the fact that this particular author's individual thoughts expressed onstage can spark emotional response with complete strangers.

This is what Art does – connects us, challenges us, expands our view about the world and ourselves.

Nothing I've read about the playwright suggests that she wrote this play so that *only* a certain group of individuals would be moved or enlightened or instructed.

The fact that for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf is still in the active canon of American school literature testifies to its exceptional value as an insightful and wide-ranging commentary on human conditions every one of us deals with every day – no matter what our individual gender, ethnicity, economic/educational/abled status etc.

When you as a non-African-American teach this play, it is obvious that your perspective will be different from that of the African-American playwright. Just as every African-American teacher will have their *own* individual perspective inherently differing in numerous ways from what Ntozake Shange was thinking when she and four friends put on their first reading at a woman's bar in Berkeley, California in 1974.

The world has changed quite a bit since then, but this play continues to help us grapple with how to make our place in it.

You should teach this play and help students understand the concept of multiple perspective. That's the essence of teaching. And it's the essence of Art. 

As Ms. Stamets suggests in her comment, definitely encourage students to ask questions about the playwriting process, which you probably do as a matter of course in your classes anyway.

L.E. McCullough / Pittsburgh, PA
www.educationalclassroomplays.com