Photo by Lindsey Abendschein
Julia Magnasco grew up with First Stage, Milwaukee’s theater for young audiences. She was a performer, an intern, a TA and now she is the company’s education director. As such, she oversees a variety of programs in which First Stage visits classrooms and teaches arts-integrated learning. Working with more than 20,000 students annually, First Stage is Wisconsin’s leader in arts-in-education programming.
How do the theater-in-education programs work?
We have a schedule of about 60 workshops a week where we are going out into classrooms. Our primary focus is arts-integrated learning, the idea that we are teaching the curriculum—English, language arts, whatever the standardized curriculum is—while simultaneously teaching the process of drama. The idea is that, if you do that well, your students are going to gain an understanding of both content areas better than if they were taught independently.
What are some ways that students interact with the material?
We look at the structure of the story. We look at characters, what the characters say about themselves, what they say about other characters and the events of the story. We explore all this through role-play, improvised scene work and readers’ theater. We have this wonderful opportunity to take a story like James and the Giant Peach and share ideas about set designs with the students. We say to them, read this chapter that’s all about the description of the peach, and now create your own set. What does it look like? And then we show them our set.
Why is it so important to bring the arts into a classroom setting?
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We strongly believe that learning should be an evolving process. It should be collaborative, it should be reflective and it should be problem solving. That’s really what we base our curriculum in, those skills, and the understanding that all of us learn differently. All of us have different ways, different modalities in which we learn. Some of us are more visual, or more oral or more kinesthetic. When you bring the arts into the classroom, it naturally infuses multiple modalities into the learning process, where sometimes a traditional methodology doesn’t allow that to occur.
What do you believe is the value of teaching art in a school’s curriculum?
Everything. I think, first and foremost, one of the things that make us human is that we have a need to create. And the arts allow us this opportunity to create. So we look at that need to create, and how it leads to innovation, and how that leads to leadership skills. But beyond that, the arts are your connector to emotion and to understanding the emotional intelligence that is so key to our ability to succeed. Understanding our emotions, regulating our emotions, being able to read other people and to work with them—those are such important things. And all of that is part of the arts.
