8/24/2023
Education and Outreach
When Andrew Wright walks into the CARE class he teaches at J.E. Manch Elementary School in Las Vegas, he knows the students selected for it have experienced challenges he could never understand.
But he also knows something else: that once these students act out a scene, or play a theater game, many of them start smiling and talking freely about their lives and emotions.
“It’s very cathartic for the kids to open up and speak, when there is no other time in their day that they can do that,” Wright says. “They can’t sit in a regular classroom and have these discussions.”
This embodies the goal of The Smith Center’s newest program, CARE (Compassionate Arts Remaking Education), with Wright serving as its lead teaching artist and creative community builder.
Under this theater-education program, now in its second year, Smith Center teaching artists utilize theater techniques to help students develop empathy and broaden their understanding of other people and the world.
Currently offered at three Southern Nevada schools, with roughly 1,600 kids participating, the center’s CARE program works specifically with students who have experienced trauma, says Melanie Jupp, director of Education and Outreach at The Smith Center.
As a nonprofit, the center offers this program at no cost to schools.
“CARE really increases and encourages building empathy,” Jupp says. “This is giving students tools to navigate life experiences, whether academically or otherwise.”
A New Kind of Classroom Experience
CARE has proven different from any program The Smith Center has offered before, Jupp says.
Originally created by the Cleveland Play House, and now expanded to The Smith Center under a federal grant, CARE draws from social-emotional learning theories and trauma-informed care, focusing on students in kindergarten through eighth grade.
For CARE’s pilot year in Las Vegas, The Smith Center hired teaching artists specifically for the program. After undergoing training facilitated by Cleveland Play House, they were placed at Las Vegas schools to teach CARE classes full time.
“(These teaching artists) had to have a very solid education background, knowing we’d be sending them into schools full-time like another teacher,” Jupp says, adding that the pilot-year schools were chosen based on high rates of trauma among their student populations. “It’s a very different skillset than for teaching artists in other programs.”
Taking on Trauma with Theater
At its heart, Wright says, CARE uses interactive theater activities to help students understand and manage five core emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, fear and confidence.
“The theater activities (used in class) depend on the teaching artist. We have an actress, a director-choreographer and a singer-songwriter,” says Wright, who has a teaching degree and has held a variety of educational positions, including for a Cirque du Soleil program. “We let them play to their strengths.”
Sometimes CARE students might act out an emotional scene, read a script they have written, or watch a monologue recorded by professional actors, he says.
They then discuss their feelings, and appropriate actions to address them.
“(We’re teaching) that’s what acting is – you’re not pretending to be sad or angry. You’re tapping into those emotions and letting them come out,” Wright says. “The kids are understanding that by embracing their emotions, they can control them.”
With a school social worker or counselor present at all CARE classes, Wright finds that many kids open up and connect, helping them cope with difficult experiences.
“We emphasize the creation of that safe space,” he says. “Here, they have a place they can go and just be themselves.”
A Promising Beginning
In the program’s first year, Wright saw students in his CARE class progress from barely speaking to fully interacting and engaging.
“There is nothing I’ve been involved with that’s nearly as impactful as this program,” he says.
Manch Elementary Principal Brandon Danowski says CARE seemed like a helpful fit for the school’s highly transient, low-income population. In an average class of 20, “15 students have had to deal with trauma,” he adds.
“I wanted to come in with a social-emotional program that was different, that could maybe get some kids here to stay, maybe motivate kids to be excited about the school itself,” Danowski says.
After hundreds of students participated in the program’s first year, he sees more positive behavior schoolwide, he says.
“I couldn’t be happier with where we’re going with (CARE),” he says.
With all three schools from the pilot year choosing to continue, Jupp hopes to see even more successes this year as The Smith Center evaluates opportunities to continue the program beyond the three-year grant funding.
“The administrators of these schools are seeing the validity of the program,” she says. “They are clearly seeing their students are benefitting.”