AATE 2025 National Conference

New York City Center, home of the Tony-honored Encores! series and the Fall for Dance Festival, has played a defining role in the cultural life of the city since 1943. For the past three years, City Center has purposefully expanded its programming in Education & Community Engagement, more than doubling its reach to over 500 classrooms, 50 community sites, and 25,000 learners of all ages. During this session we will shine a light on City Center’s approach to serving historically underrepresented communities, building deep and sustainable partnerships, and how leading as internal change agents propelled our successful growth. City Center’s guiding values of curiosity, accessibility, inclusivity, and collaboration will serve as a backdrop for how we might all better serve our communities and create broader impact in learning and engagement work. And the excavated best practices, surprising discoveries, and unexpected setbacks we encountered will set the stage for an in-depth, hands-on experience focused on the journey of your performing arts center, classrooms and community spaces as you chart your own path toward successful expansion of the good work you do.

This 75-minute will explore how to embed social justice practices meaningfully into arts organizations whose mission doesn’t specifically include social justice. Centering care, agency, and identity, this interactive session invites participants to consider how theater and performing arts can serve as pathways for community change-making. New Victory Education has been working to embed equity practices more deeply in its core values. Inspired by drafted language: “We are dedicated to honoring and uplifting identity, fostering joyful resistance, and empowering kids, families, and teachers to take positive action through the arts”—as a foundation, this session will examine how to move beyond reactive approaches to create proactive, sustainable frameworks for addressing societal challenges. Participants will explore how to share power in learning and art-making spaces, diminish hierarchical structures, and center collaboration, collective care, and joy. The session will highlight New Victory’s “Speak Up, Act Out” program, which empowers young people to examine activism and artivism, identify hyperlocal issues, and create advocacy works through performing arts. Drawing from this model, the facilitators will showcase strategies for co-creating messaging around timely social issues and fostering impactful action plans that can directly benefit the local community. Participants will engage in meaningful dialogue and reflection while considering theater-based techniques to facilitate social justice-based conversations in their own communities. Whether you’re an educator, administrator, or artist, you’ll leave with actionable tools to embed equity and justice into your practice. Now is the time to meet the moment, transforming arts organizations into catalysts for change. This session offers vital insights for advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion while ensuring the arts remain a powerful force for social transformation.

It is estimated that 22% of children and adolescents struggle with disordered eating. Theatre education environments can inadvertently promote risk factors through our casting, costuming, and classroom practices, and few educators receive training on how to recognize and ameliorate these risks. This evidence-based, solutions-focused session will encourage self-reflection and provide participants with strategies to begin incorporating primary prevention practices into their pedagogy. Topics include addressing implicit and explicit anti-fat bias, supporting positive identity development, and modeling healthy habits and language.

Build and/or expand your teaching toolbox! With degrees in both performance and special education and over 12,000 learners taught, Burcher will help teaching artists unpack over a dozen educational teaching strategies for a variety of classroom environments. Explore classroom management strategies, behavior management strategies, educational models, learning models, assessment types, and more through theoretical and practical lenses. As a group we will briefly examine our practices for burnout triggers and learn strategies to avoid flaming out of the industry. Participants can expect to leave the session with applicable tools for their students, for their teaching, and for themselves.

The field of theatre education is growing in rich soil, thanks to the expanding influence of voices traditionally marginalized or silenced. Scholar/practitioners such as David Valdez (Beyond “Decolonizing the Syllabus”) and Sherrell D. Luckett et. al. (Training theatre students of colour in the United States), among others, are adept at transforming personal experiences into reflections that illuminate links between theory and practice, links that make us think. AATE’s Youth Theatre Journal and a new book comprised of chapters written solely by K - 12 classroom theatre educators and teaching artists (tentatively titled The Teachers of Color Writers’ Collective and co-edited Jo Beth Gonzalez and Martin Rodriguez) seek more new voices. This writing workshop engages representatives of the global majority who want support and guidance in crafting narratives into writing that profiles aspects of theatre education from their unique, and too often excluded, vantage points. This session is devoted to generating ideas for the Teachers of Color Writers’ Collective book chapter topics and YTJ submissions, and building connections between new writing partners. Examples of writing partnerships (among other possibilities) include pairings such as: a classroom practitioner with scholar, an experienced practitioner/scholar with a classroom practitioner, two classroom practitioners with a scholar/advisor.

The practice of Twinning engages two groups in a theatrical collaboration. Through the magic of modern technology, twin teen groups in Brooklyn and Turkey created cross-cultural connections from across the world. Their exploration of topics from Spiderman and Spotify to dating and family culminated in shared theatre pieces—and even a shared meal! In this session, you’ll have the chance to try out twinning, hear from project participants, and plan your own twinning experience.

As theatre institutions continue to grapple with racial and social justice movements educators of higher learning and administrators on college campuses are tasked with integrating Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEI&A) into their organizational culture in a way that is sustainable, effective, and trauma-informed. This interactive workshop introduces The Artists Heal® Method —a groundbreaking framework that supports DEI&A implementation through a holistic, trauma-informed, and anti-racist approach. Using a four-pillar structure—Self & Selfhood, Trauma-Informed Practices, Creativity, Collaboration & Communion, and Practical Tools & Pathways—this session offers a path for theatre educators, college administrators, and students to foster healing-centered classrooms strategically dismantling harmful institutional systems. Participants will explore the concepts of DIS-functionality (disorganized systems) vs. DYS-functionality (dysregulated systems) to identify patterns within their own organizations that perpetuate inequity and harm. Through guided exercises and facilitated discussion, attendees will gain practical tools for navigating classroom management, setting boundaries, and leading DEI&A work in higher education spaces. This workshop is designed for theatre educators, administrators, and those committed to DEI&A work looking to create lasting change in their organizations. Attendees will leave with tangible strategies for implementing DEI&A efforts with integrity, fostering classroom cultures that center psychological safety, and addressing institutional resistance with confidence.

Early childhood drama rightly includes many games, open dramatic play, and creative dramatics, among other activities; however, engaging very young children in actual script writing is often overlooked. After all, at this age, children are learning the basics of language and still building the fine motor skills to physically put words on paper. This session will give drama educators/directors a manageable process to transform very young actors into script writers capable of composing their own monologues. Using a modified sentence frame format, young actors combine growing skills in ELA, academic language, performance sensibilities, and imagination to create a written monologue that they can perform or that can be performed by others. In addition, the session will include extensions of this project that help children build on their vocal and movement skills, as well as a number of ways for teachers and directors to differentiate the process for all actors' talents and abilities.

Just because it’s how it’s always been done, doesn’t mean it’s how it should be done! This workshop explores student-centered teaching strategies that can help us do better by the next generation of theatre makers. Attendees will leave with proven methods and corresponding projects that can immediately be applied to a variety of different learning environments and classroom types.

Seesaw Theatre Company creates original, sensory theatre for neurodivergent and disabled audiences. During this session we will introduce what sensory theatre is and why it is so vital to the theatre community. We will discuss how we devise and create sensory theatre and then gear it towards our intended audience. At Seesaw we create theatre that is accessible to all audiences from the very beginning instead of tacking accessibility on at the end. Theatre is a tool for creating connections and this can only be done when all audiences are included. Our shows subvert the notion that theatre is something to watch from afar, bringing the show to the participants and allowing them to interact with our cast on a personal level. The kids who come in as audience members create the shows as much as the cast does. We incorporate improvisational techniques, props, music and personalized interactions to engage our audience and help accommodate them on an individual level, providing an equitable theatre experience. After presenting about what it is we do we will take session participants through typical seesaw training, exploring the type of theatre we create. As we create sensory theatre a hands-on experience is much more effective and we encourage participants to explore what sensory theatre might mean to them. We will provide Seesaw sensory props and tools to help create sensory theatre as well as have participants explore what it is like to be a kid interacting with these props. We will end the session by talking about how our inclusive theatre can be incorporated into all types of theatre work.

As the climate crisis intensifies, impacting Global Majority and other marginalized communities "first and worst," how might we initiate critical conversations about Environmental (In)justice with the young people we teach and create with and for? How might our tools as theatre artists be uniquely equipped to help us make sense of our current reality, trace the histories and systems of power that brought us to this point, and envision radically just and thriving futures? This 75-minute workshop, based on an arts-integrated lesson originally developed for a 7th Grade Social Studies classroom in Austin, TX grapples with these very questions. You’ll be invited to experience the workshop as well as brainstorm how you might adapt it for the communities and contexts in which you work. Through Theatre of the Oppressed activities, collaborative analysis of maps and other artifacts, and visual arts expression, we’ll explore one potential creative entry point into these conversations about Environmental (In)justice and the climate crisis with the young people in our lives.