Creating Supportive Feedback Practices to Address Applied Theatre Students’ Anxieties in a Higher Education Course

Abstract

This article explores the ways in which two years of increased isolation due to COVID affected a cohort of applied theatre students and how their instructors addressed students’ elevated anxiety and disconnection from community. In the spring semester of 2022, I was working as the teaching intern for the course Applied Theatre Praxis taught by Professor Joe Salvatore at New York University. The students—who ranged from undergraduate upperclassmen majoring in Educational Theatre to doctoral students in various arts disciplines—were required to facilitate an applied theatre residency project with a community to which they were connected in some way. Students responded to having to work with one of their own communities with acute anxiety: many claimed they were not part of a community. This group response was due to a complex web of factors stemming from two years of increased isolation due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article, I will describe the teaching strategies Professor Salvatore and I used to help students overcome this anxiety by creating opportunities to rehearse and reflect on their facilitation practices and grounding student-facilitators in their values.

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Notes on contributors

Saya Jenks

Saya Jenks (she/her) is an applied theatre facilitator and social researcher based in New York City. She is currently a PhD candidate and adjunct faculty member in the Program in Educational Theatre at New York University. Saya loves bringing play and theatre to places that could use more of both: she has taught theatre at law firms and software companies, in Pre-K and graduate classrooms alike. Saya is an experiential leadership workshop designer for On Deck Workshops, where she has led trainings for clients such as YouTube, Bloomberg, Intuit, LinkedIn, and Morrison & Foerster LLP. She received her M.A. in Educational Theatre from NYU and B.A. in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity from Stanford University. education.