collaboration/transformation by jack zipes

Neighborhood Bridges Collaboration and Transformation

© Children’s Theatre, 2009. All rights reserved. page 1

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Collaboration and Transformation

by Jack Zipes

COLLABORATION

From the beginning there was a danger - and there still is - that we would enter a

classroom and impose our methods and ideas on teachers and children. However, we have a

slogan, borrowed from Bertolt Brecht, which keeps us fairly honest: we do our best to make

ourselves dispensable. It is only the fearful individual who wants to retain power by keeping all his

knowledge to himself. By not sharing knowledge, the expert can pose as omniscient. We want to

show that we are all fortunately replaceable, different but replaceable - especially when it comes to

sharing knowledge and skills.

To this end, we make contact with all the schools, teachers, and administrators in the

spring before we offer our program. We acquaint ourselves with the school community to the best

of our ability. Prior to the school year, we offer a workshop where we introduce the Neighborhood

Bridges curriculum and methods, the anthology of stories, as well as ways the teachers can use

our program to reinforce their own curriculum and teaching methods. During the school year, each

pair of teaching artists and classroom teachers holds a weekly, hour-long preparatory meeting to

discuss changes, problems, and new ideas. Three times a year, we hold joint meetings with all the

teachers and teaching artists to discuss challenges and future plans.

Being at the forefront of education reform is a difficult task, one that is not without its

challenges. Ironically, one of the toughest challenges we face in implementing Neighborhood

Bridges arises between our curriculum and the classroom teachers' curriculum, which largely



focuses on the state's regulations and standardized tests. Teachers have found that our work

makes the writing, reading, and learning that the children do more pleasurable and even more

effective than the official programs. These same teachers, however, feel pressure to limit the time

they spend on our arts-based curriculum, as they prepare their students to take the state's

standardized tests. This is the kind of contradiction that we actually seek to expose, as well as to

resolve through collaboration.

Our collaboration, however, does not just involve teaching artists, classroom teachers, and

administrators, but also university students and professors, the staff at The Children's Theatre

(CTC), and other local arts organizations. At certain stages of the program, their expertise is called

upon, and their knowledge shared. In February students bind their stories into books with the help

of the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. In the spring, scenic artists from CTC work with the children

to build their own sets, props, and costumes which they use in their final performance at The

Crossing Bridges Festival. This celebration, which takes place at CTC in May, is the year's most

elaborate collaboration, drawing an audience of students, teachers, parents, and community

members from eight different schools. Each classroom performs an original play which they

developed and produced with the help of their classroom teacher and teaching artist - a

collaborative effort that expresses and articulates how the children see and imagine themselves in

the world around them.

TRANSFORMATION

The children in May are not the same children that we meet in September. Obviously they

will have changed because of all sorts of biological, psychological, and social factors. Viewed in

light of our program, however, we can note individual and collective changes in varying degrees.

We encourage and foster this transformation in two primary ways: we are constantly changing the



classroom environment and introducing the children to new environments; we use improvisation to

change rules and regulations and to shift their expectations and audience expectations.

Each session that we conduct is held within the school classroom - an environment that we

are constantly transforming. After the fantastic binominal, a game that involves movement by the

teaching artists, writing, and students sharing stories in front of their classmates, the chairs and

tables are pushed to the side for the duration of the Bridges session. Through this simple

adjustment, the group creates a free space, a no-place where we can create whatever environment

we want - a deep transformation, on a number of levels. The children recognize that their

classroom can be something other than it normally is, the objects they find in it will become

whatever they imagine them to be, and - most profoundly - they themselves will become other than

what they think they are.

Environmental change leads to personal change. Just as our initial game with the fantastic

binominal animates the children to conceive stories in which two haphazard elements can be

brought together through their imagination to form a story, their story, so our emphasis on

movement and taking over terrain in the classroom for storytelling, discussion, games, rehearsal,

and performance can lead to an understanding of how appropriation can work.

As much as possible, we want to suggest to the children (and the teachers) that

appropriation can enable them to express their desires and needs. We model change. We take

risks. We show that we are not afraid to take risks even when we may make blunders. We adapt to

constantly changing conditions in the classroom and in the school. We respond to parents who

may not want their children to participate in our games because of religious reasons. We try to

show how change may be linked to tolerance, and we form three groups of children within the

classroom that stay together throughout the year. We hope that the formation of these groups will

enable them to build their own little community and to cooperate with one another. We try to foster



respect and understanding among the three groups that we have formed. In the end, they will join

together and be changed into one large community to produce a play for other classes and

schools.

With our emphasis on transformation, we have witnessed shy children stepping into

spaces that they had never entered before and fulfilling themselves. We have seen children who

are unwilling to work with the teachers, to read and write during the week, join with us to act, read,

write, and express themselves as freely as they want. We have seen children conceive art, writing,

and dramatic projects that represent changes they have been undergoing and reveal how much

they are discovering about themselves and the world around them. Finally, we note changes in the

teachers and ourselves - how more sensitive we become to the children's needs and our own and

how we use conversation to do problem solving and to create projects that build on our social

awareness and creative designs.

collaboration/transformation by jack zipes

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