AATE 2025 National Conference

Personal stories provide a window into the unique ways people make meaning of their lives, their traditions, and the world around them. Listening to others tell their stories can help develop listening and interviewing skills, emotional and cultural intelligence, and empathy through understanding the different ways people live and think about their lives. Add to this the element of turning interviews into a performance, and questions as how to represent these voices authentically and ethically, yet shaped to share with an audience, also emerge. This workshop explores how oral history storytelling and verbatim/documentary theatre projects based on interviews can be conducted around themes that impact the students and their communities. How does one guide the selection of a theme for a student or class project? What does preparation and ethics look like for conducting interviews, shaped to the age and abilities of the students? How does one guide the process of working with the material or devising to produce a storytelling or theatre performance? What does an economy of care look like in this process, and when is it important (and how) to give back the performance to those whose stories are being shared? The workshop provides a hands-on opportunity to try out methods, reflect on these questions in a collaborative space, and share any personal experiences with interview-based art or performance projects. Dialogue is what happens along the way in project-based learning.