Jeanne Klein

Theorizing Aesthetic Transactions from Children's Criterial Values in Theatre for Young Audiences

Child spectators and adult theatre critics often hold opposite views on what makes the “best” theatre for young people. To explain why this enormous gap exists, we discuss childrens aesthetic criteria as cross-cultural spectators and examine the theoretical and methodological differences between aesthetic appreciation and artistic criticism. To explain aesthetic transactions between child spectators and adult actors, we discuss our different philosophical interpretations of aesthetic distance and propose two models to stimulate further discussions. Future reception studies need to integrate theories of aesthetic philosophy and developmental psychology to raise the artistic quality of TYA around the world.

Performance Factors that Inhibit Empathy and Trigger Distancing: Crying to Laugh

This study received an Honorable Mention for the Research Award by the American Alliance for Theatre and Education, August 1994.

Criticism and Appreciation in Theatre for Young Audiences

Criticism refers to the public act of discerning, analyzing, interpreting, and judging theatre performances and dramatic literature. Its artistic purpose is to convey one person’s aesthetic experience of a theatrical event and its observable “effects” on other spectators by justifying one’s opinions with artistic criteria and evidence interpreted from performances. In contrast, Elliot Eisner refers to appreciation as the private act of appraising a performance’s artistic qualities, but with no obligation to justify one’s opinions about its emotional effects other than to articulate one’s culturespecific criteria (1991, p. 85). As Wolfgang Schneider reminds us, Goethe (1819) noted “three types of [spectators]: one who appreciates without criticizing, another who criticizes without appreciation, and the intermediate one who appreciatively criticizes and critically appreciates; this latter one essentially reproduces a work of art again” (1995, p. 71).

Mapping Aesthetic Development and Epistemological Understanding

How do we know? What personal theories of mind do we hold about knowledge and knowing in general and theatre in particular? When critiquing performances, what sources of artistic knowledge, evidence, and criteria do we rely upon to articulate our aesthetic experiences and justify our judgments? If one goal of theatre education is to acquire and extend knowledge about human experiences, knowing how students and we ourselves think about that knowledge may assist us when teaching performance criticism. Since the late 1960s, cognitive psychologists have examined how we acquire, understand, and construct knowledge as subjective knowers in relation to the objectively known world of phenomenal reality. Over time, we construct tacit theories about our minds as individual ways of knowing, known as a “personal epistemology,” along four main dimensions. These dimensions include our perspectives regarding 1) the un/certainty of knowledge, 2) the simplicity and complexity of knowledge, 3) our sources of knowledge and evidence, and, 4) our assertions, claims, or justifications based on the criteria we employ to test the validity of our evidence. Convergent frameworks of personal epistemology are characterized by how often we position ourselves in four basic stances as 1) imitative realists, 2) dualistic absolutists, 3) relativistic multiplists, and 4) critical evaluatists. These domain-general perspectives or “stages” of epistemological understanding may operate in a spiraling progression of recursion in that we may repeat some traits from a previous stage in varying degrees depending on domain-specific tasks in situated contexts.2 In the specific domain of visual art, Michael Parsons has proposed a developmental framework of aesthetic epistemology that describes how we move

Mediating Childhood: How Child Spectators Interpret Actors’ Bodies in Theatrical Media

While many adults endeavor to remain young against biological odds, the overarching work of childhood calls for reaching adulthood against the socializing (and highly politicized) forces of mediated culture. In strident debates and moral panics over mass media consumption, adults position themselves in relation to children in two basic ways. Protectionists believe that they should protect youngsters from adults’ secrets and keep them innocently pure for as long as possible by regulating or censoring their media diets via parental and governmental policies. Nurturers, on the other hand, believe children should negotiate these secrets openly in compassionate conversations that nurture their rights and responsibilities as democratic citizens. Between these two camps lie children themselves, who make and control many of their own decisions about media preferences no matter what adults think. While media content contains countless messages about human conditions, how actors communicate these dramatized messages matters greatly as age-identified bodies perform and mediate child-adult constructs on stage and screen.

Learning Theatre from Children

Many undergraduate theatre students leave college to work as teaching artists or interns at professional theatre companies, community arts centers, and summer camps, without having substantial, theory-and-practice-based opportunities to work directly with children. As a case study of pedagogical strategies, this chapter examines a drama methods course called Children and Drama that includes children (aged six to twelve) in order to better prepare undergraduates not only to teach but to learn the organic foundations of theatre and devised performance through the processes of drama. As students practice drama leadership, children teach them to release their self-imposed inhibitions, expand their dramatic imaginations, take creative risks, follow unpredictable direction, and rectify their prejudicial stereotypes about children’s extra-ordinary intelligence and dramatic competencies.

Thirty-plus years of empirical drama/theatre research

ABSTRACT To review our field’s maturation over the past thirty-plus years, I trace research methodologies from the archives of the Youth Theatre Journal and its predecessor, the Children’s Theatre Review, with special attention to the overarching purposes of our research over time. After questioning postmodern debates over empirical methods, I interpret the tripartite structures of this empirically based research and call for future literature reviews of past evidence. While my self-reflexive examination reveals problematic assumptions regarding the consequences of our empirical research, I offer alternative perspectives and post-factual strategies for future research in this and other journals.

International handbook of research in arts education

In this extraordinary International Handbook of Research in Arts Education, Liora Bresler gathers over 100 scholars from 35 countries and 20 languages. As she foregrounds in her Introduction, although the arts in some nations have developed advocacy partnerships to justify their existence in education over the past 40 years, disciplines have largely preserved their separate identities with few pragmatic connections and little cross-disciplinary awareness to enrich their respective theoretical knowledge and pedagogical practices. The two-fold aims of this handbook are to synthesise existing scholarship in music, visual art, dance, drama, and creative literature in order to facilitate cross-fertilisations and advance transformations within and across disciplines (pp. xvii xix). Given that cross-disciplinary fertilisations are left up to readers’ imaginations if one reads both volumes in their entirety, I will attempt to cross-fertilise research in applied theatre by highlighting and juxtaposing those issues I find most significant in other arts disciplines in keeping with Bresler’s aims. Readers may pick and choose from among 13 sections (written by few drama/theatre authors) that cover inter-dependent topics: History (Bolton), Curriculum (O’Toole and O’Mara), Assessment and Evaluation (Schonmann), Composition (McKean), Appreciation (Schonmann; J. Hughes), and Museums and Cultural Centers (C. Hughes, Jackson, and Kidd) in Part One; and Informal Learning, Child Culture (Woodson), Social and Cultural Issues (McCammon), The Body (Osmond), Creativity (Gallagher), Technology, and Spirituality in Part Two each summarised in Preludes by section editors. Within each section, many authors describe existing studies without necessarily synthesising the accumulated evidence, making it extremely difficult to ascertain which research questions remain for future explorations. While most chapters address research conducted in North America, northern Europe, and Australia, readers will also find valuable counterpoints from leading educators in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and South America in dialogic International Commentaries and Interludes that extend global conversations.