TYA Topics!

My first semester at CSUB, and I'm teaching a couple of fun courses that are right up my alley: Dramatic Literature for Youth, and Dramatic Activity in the Classroom. In the lit course, the only textbook is an anthology of plays for young audiences, and it's a really good collection: Theatre for Youth II: More Plays With Mature Themes, which is (obviously) a second collection of plays to go with the first collection. So, in addition to reading and analyzing the plays, we looked at related topics in Theatre for Young Audiences. Besides analyzing the plays, the big project for the semester was a group project -- in groups of 3, the students were to select a play, analyze it, research it, create a teacher's study guide as if a class was going to see the play, and then give a presentation about it. At the end of the semester, the group study guides were due. I encouraged them to add to and refine their guides continuously over the semester.

Since there was no other text, I made of list of topics we'd address through lecture, discussion and articles, and this is the list:

History of TYA

Analyzing a play (several days on this topic)

Storybook adaptations

Ages and stages

Common core standards

Lesson plans

Theatre for the Very Young

Grades K-2

Grades 3-5

Grades 6-8

Grades 9-12

Special Education

Participation Theatre

Difficult Topics and Themes

Social Emotional Learning

Theatre-in-Education

Performing FOR children/children performing

TYA playwrights

TYA professional companies

Sources for scripts, copyrights and royalties

Associations, resources and publications