No More Thoughts and Prayers: What the Performance of Youth Protest In

ISSN 2040-2228

Vol. 11 No. 1 April 2020

Drama Research: international journal of drama in education

Article 6

No More Thoughts and Prayers: What the Performance of Youth Protest in Real-World and Online Communities Might Tell Us About the Future of Theatre for and with Young People in the United States of America.

Amy Jensen

National Drama Publications www.nationaldrama.org.uk/journal/ [email protected] www.nationaldrama.org.uk

Drama Research Vol. 11 No. 1 April 2020

Amy Jensen

Abstract

In this paper I consider where we as drama and theatre educators and youth theatre professionals place our bodies and with whom we build our affective ties. This desire grows out of my observation that institutionally we make more theatre for young audiences than we do theatre with young people acting as co-creators and full collaborators in the United States. Using the youth response to the Parkland, Florida school shooting in 2018 I make the case that our institutions need to reimagine more inclusive relationships with young people in ways that value their capacities as agents of change.

Key Words: Youth, Centennials, Change Agents, Co-Creation, Collaboration, Authorship, Ownership, Community, Identity, Affective ties.

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Introduction

‘We are challenged to forge connections across borders of difference within our communities and around the globe. We can no longer rely on some benign sense of ‘sameness’ to build our identities and serve as the basis of our communities’ (Rowe and Licona 2005).

I am a mother of eighteen-year-old twin daughters. I am a fifty-year-old Caucasian, cisgender woman. I have a partner of thirty years. I’m a daughter and a sister. I reside in the Western United States at the base of a beautiful mountain range. Additionally, I am an academic who thinks about youth and digital media and performance. Truthfully, I have less time to think about adolescents and performance these days because I am also an administrator at my university where I spend much of my time leading college meetings and completing university paperwork. Frustratingly, those careful thoughts about young people are often at the margins of my other work. These sentences only describe some of me. I am also a part of a civic community, a religious community, an academic community, a theatre community, a hiking community, and so on. It’s from all of these contexts I have read and re-read Aimee Carrillo Rowe’s essay, ‘Be Longing: Toward a Feminist Politics of Relation’ (2005: 15-46). I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what the essay teaches me about my own belonging(s), and about our collective belonging(s) as a field of theatre educators concerned with youth.

Carrillo Rowe begins her essay with the assertion that ‘[W]ho we love is political’ (she means who and love in the broadest sense), and she further articulates that,

‘The sites of our belonging constitute how we see the world, what we value, who we are (becoming)…. The meaning of self,’ she says, ‘… is never individual, but a shifting set of relations that we move in and out of, often without reflection’ (2005:16).

Carrillo Rowe confides in readers that she has often resided in spaces where she has shifted and changed as a part of the environment and the people within it. However, she notes that she has still thought of herself as singular despite the adaptation in environs and people. Carrillo Rowe describes this mode as ineffective in our contemporary moment. She makes the point that we can no longer live lone and adjacent to each other. Instead she invites us to adopt a ‘politics of relation’ in which the social and political conditions that shape our belongings are more visible and intertwined. She says,

‘A politics of relation is not striving toward absolute alterity to the self, but rather to tip the concept of ‘subjectivity’ away from ‘individuality,’ and in the direction of the inclination toward the other so that ‘being’ is constituted not first through the ‘Self,’ but through its own longings to be with’ (2005:17).

What matters, then, is where we place our bodies, and with whom we build our affective ties.

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Theatre for and with Young People.

In this article I want to consider where we, as theatre educators and youth theatre professionals, place our bodies and with whom we build our affective ties. This desire grows out of my observation that we make more theatre for young audiences than we do theatre with young people.

In the United States the Theatre Education and the Theatre for Young Audiences field has been historically populated primarily by educated, Caucasian women. While this is slowly changing, many in our field look and sound like me (especially as I described myself earlier). If we identify our collective longings for our field we state that we want to serve young people and children using theatre. For example, the American Alliance for Theatre in Education’s mission statement reads,

‘[AATE] serves and inspires a growing collective of theatre artists, educators, and scholars committed to transforming young people and communities through the theatre arts’ (see https://www.aate.com/mission-vision-values).

Similarly, the TYA/USA website states that the membership organisation

‘…serves and represents the national field of the theatre for young audiences’ by promoting artistic excellence, advocating a national awareness of the impact that theatre has on children and families, and cultivating diversity, equity, and inclusion in our field (online at http://www.tyausa.org/about-tyausa/).

These statements represent our desires: to make art for young people, to advocate for young people, to transform young people’s lives, but they also represent our lack. Based on our own mission statements, young people themselves border our work. We may flank them, but we have not yet institutionally intermingled our work with their work. This means that their cultural, social, emotional, and political concerns are usually not fully represented in our field and are instead filtered through our individual and collective perspectives. (To speak frankly and honestly, this article is an example of my exact concern.)

I believe that we would be better institutionally and individually if we figured out new ways to primarily work with young people. To this end I hope to identify some of the qualities that Centennials, or those born after the advent of the 21st century (also identified as GenZ, iGen, digital natives, and etc.) possess and then draw some conclusions about how we might build a better collaborative coalition with them. To do this I will first outline some ways that we might learn from and draw on a portion of Positive Youth Development literature. Then I will identify how some of the questions asked within the field of Positive Youth Development might better help us to view our youth as allies in the further development of our ideas and practice.

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What We Might Learn from Positive Youth Development Models

In 2006 Louise B. Jennings and her colleagues introduced a framework that identified six key dimensions of youth empowerment. The framework grew out of their analysis of existing positive youth development and empowerment action research which at that point placed value on young people’s active community participation (Kim 1998), youth gaining control and mastery of themselves within pertinent contexts (Rapport 1987, Zimmerman 2000), and adolescents receiving affirmation and reinforcement from adults (Chinman and Linney 1998).

Building on these values Jennings et. al. define empowerment in the context of their framework as

‘…a multi-level construct consisting of practical approaches and applications, social action processes, and individual and collective outcomes’ (2006:32).

For them empowerment refers to

‘individuals, families, organisations, and communities gaining control and mastery, within the social, economic, and political contexts of their lives, in order to improve equity and quality of life.’ (2006:32).

The framework establishes six baseline attributes that lead to healthy youth empowerment within organisations and communities. The structural characteristics they include are:

• a welcoming, safe environment, • meaningful participation and engagement, • equitable power-sharing between youth and adults, engagement in critical reflection on interpersonal and sociopolitical processes, • participation in sociopolitical processes to affect change, and • integrated individual- and community-level empowerment …. with discussion of the measurement of outcomes, and the challenges and opportunities for empowerment in youth organisation.

Within the last decade positive youth development (PYD) and empowerment scholars have added nuance to this baseline. Here are a few examples. Redmond and Dolan (2014) call on thought leaders and practitioners to more thoroughly consider environmental conditions in which youth partnerships develop. They state that:

‘Having the right environmental conditions is necessary for the development of youth leadership. This can be conceptualized as having genuine opportunities for leadership and having access to mentors who can guide an individual through their leadership journey.’ (2014: 266).

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Writing about improving PYD models to include and invite young women of colour, Clonan-Roy, Jacobs, and Nakkula, add the traits of resilience (that is, effective coping behaviours and strategies that enable the pursuit of personal goals and a positive sense of self-worth in the face of adversity) and resistance (that is, practicing resistance for liberation, practicing self-righting tendencies, practicing self-protection) to persevere through adversity and challenging experiences (2016:115).

In its own ecological framework for PYD the American Interagency Working Group on Youth Programmes, which is composed of representatives from 21 federal agencies and whose work is designed to help organisations create, maintain, and strengthen effective youth programmes declares within its PYD goals that,

‘[Effective] PYD involves youth as active agents. Youth are valued and encouraged to participate in design, delivery, and evaluation of the services. Adults and youth work in partnership’ (Accessed online).

Many, many in our fields of theatre and drama education are also already invested in work that summons adults to actively participate in partnership with young people as co-collaborators. If you are reading this, I imagine that you are aware of the shared work that is happening near you. You have surely participated in theatre in education activities, utilised applied theatre techniques, and engaged young people in devising processes that approach some of the PYD goals described above. There is certainly drama/theatre research that promotes PYD principles within educational and applied theatre settings. For instance, Hunter invites theatre facilitators to create safe spaces in which young participants move beyond ineffectively ‘rehearsing social change.’ She instead asks them to create spaces in which young or marginalised participants are able to access their own agency. She describes these safe environments as

‘space in which individuals in a collective environment can be empowered to encounter risk on their own terms’ (2008:18).

In another exemplar, Vettraino et. al. describe the importance of co-determination, or the ‘continuity of connection between facilitators and young people’ while practicing applied theatre. They see co-determinate efforts as pivotal to learning processes in which adults and young people work

‘with and between [each other] rather than at or on each other.’ (2017: 89).

Others studying youth-engaged-applied theatre research models highlight the benefit of genuine partnerships in which all participants practice with and learn from each other (Anderson and O’Conner, 2013). Yet others emphasise that co-collaborative opportunities allow for authentic self-representation rather than the removed representation by a knowledgeable researcher (Gallagher 2011). Gallagher underscores the importance of engaged theatre research work with youth that

‘provides a robust environment for questioning… or recreates ‘real life’ situations in which collaborators are able to more freely experiment with

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alternative strategies and perspectives in testing the validity of their own theories and insights about the world.’ (2011: 328)

The writings of two of my American colleagues, Stephani Etheridge Woodson, and Megan Alrutz, have helped me to imagine what a theatre practice in which youth are empowered looks like in my own setting. Here are some of their ideas. In Digital Storytelling Applied Theatre, & Youth Megan Alrutz invites us to explore

‘new models of authorship and ownership that truly value collaborative endeavors’ and ‘take into account the intellectual and artistic property generated by young people within participatory performance programmes’ (2015: 113).

In her book Theatre for Youth: Third Space Stephanie Etheridge Woodson extends Alrutz’s ideas beyond creation processes to include ideas about how we might shape our structural organisational processes. She describes young people as key to community cultural development and change. She depicts children and youth as ‘civic publics,’ who are

‘able to collectively engage in the public sphere and civic environments’ and as ‘agents and assets within their communities’ (2015: 81-82).

Etheridge Woodson powerfully identifies a notion of development that is key to engaging in balanced, collaborative partnerships with youth. Of development she says,

‘I use development as a part of a lifelong journey; competence for example has no fixed upper limit. A youth development model understood in this manner does not place information or knowledge out there and separate from the individual. We do not get developed nor do we have development. Rather we develop.’

Development for Etheridge Woodson can be

‘understood to be an organic structure, innate to the human condition rather than an imposed or mechanical one.’

In this vein she posits a challenge that has not been fully answered within the PYD literature or in our own field of study. She encourages us to dismiss notions of young people as only ‘becoming’ and instead asks,

‘What kinds of human beings are our children already?’ (2015: 58-59).

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What Kinds of Human Beings are Our Children Already?

In the following paragraphs I share a beginning response to Etheridge Woodson’s potent question. I describe my observations about how a group of Centennials engaged in cultural, social, emotional, and political work and I then extrapolate from these instances ways that we might think about the assets that our children already have and could contribute to our study and practice.

The case study I present here grew out of a recent difficult event that took place in the United States: the 2018 Parkland, Florida school shooting and its aftermath. While I have selected this event as a case study from which I make my points there are many other examples of Centennials engaging in similar ways across the globe. Young activists are changing the world as they aggressively use their voices to interact with others and make change. A few recent examples include Greta Thunberg of Sweden, who is currently engaging the world’s youth in an impactful dialogue about climate change; Pakistan’s Malala Yousafzai, whose advocacy for girls education led to international influence and the Nobel Peace Prize; and Manu Gaspar of the Philippines, whose human rights work with Amnesty International and the United Nations is carving out safe spaces for queer youth across Asia.

In this article I have chosen to focus on the young activists associated with the Parkland, Florida shooting. I will describe four moments that occurred in the aftermath of the shooting and have singled out a few of the students involved. I have selected this event because it signals some of the ways that Centennials are already actively engaging with the world and the kinds of ways they are already prepared to contribute. I will focus on the following ways that they participate:

• Centennials can purposefully negotiate and create using both live and digital communication. • Centennials often demonstrate their desire to include a broad audience in emotionally charged conversations and actively participate in animate and virtual spaces simultaneously with the intent of reaching a variety of audiences, including adults. • Centennials can be socially conscious and politically aware and are often eager participants in both local and global conversations. • Centennials can capably present and share their own authentic digital identities and are often aware of the ways that fans (and others) leverage their identity markers to further (protest) messages.

The Horrific Event and Young People’s Responses

On February 14, 2018 seventeen people, including 14 students and 3 school staff members were killed in a mass shooting that occurred at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland Florida. Armed with an AR-15 Semi-Automatic rifle, the nineteen-year-old shooter took an Uber to the school grounds near the end of the

Article 6 No More Thoughts and Prayers 8 Drama Research Vol. 11 No. 1 April 2020 school day. Securing his weapon and multiple magazines in a duffle bag and backpack, he entered the school and opened fire, haphazardly shooting those within his aim.

Surviving students’ responses were visceral. Operationalising in both real world and virtual spaces, many Marjory Stoneman Douglas students spoke out in protest against gun violence in the United States. Their responses are helpful in imagining the ways that Centennials can work together and with others to engage in issues that matter to them. Here are some of my observations about the events that occurred around the shooting and the aftermath.

Centennials can purposefully negotiate and create using both live and digital communication

Student activists entered the gun control debate even while the school was still in lock down. Senior student David Hogg documented his observations of the incident by filming and then sharing it with others via video feed. The live feed shared the experience of Hogg and fellow students as they hid in their Advanced Placement Environmental Science Classroom less than forty-five minutes after the shootings occurred. In the following video link the Los Angeles Times shares the original footage of Hogg and his peers as they each try to make sense of the crisis that is occurring outside of their classroom.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=8&v=YnzoYVrk9Kk (Los Angeles Times 15 February 2018)

In the short digital record Hogg and fellow students describe their immediate circumstances. Initially they talk of feeling isolated within the classroom while the building is being secured, then they begin to realize the terror of the situation they are in because of the active shooter, finally they start to advocate for gun control. Near the end of the 3:47 video segment Hogg calls on ‘legislators of the country to take action and stop [gun violence] from happening’ (Hogg: 2018).

Like other Centennials, Hogg demonstrates a deep understanding of live and digital communication. His purposeful and carefully crafted digital record and its dissemination introduce the world to the students of Stoneman Douglas as they work to determine what is happening in the midst of the event. The video also introduces his personal politics. Later his digital savvy and articulate responses to the news media make him and his family the target of conspiracy theorists who label him a ‘crisis actor.’ While the label ‘crisis actor’ is meant to be derisive and dismissive, the fact that the term ‘actor’ is so immediately and naturally invoked should be significant to theatre practitioners as an acknowledgment of a purposeful, immersive and outward facing communication that is present in the moment. This actorly, and theatrically constructed message is in fact the chosen, purposeful, consequential, and natural language of Mr. Hogg in the moment to create a relationship with a still forming community.

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Centennials often demonstrate their desire to include a broad audience in emotionally charged conversations and actively participate in animate and virtual spaces simultaneously with the intent of reaching a variety of audiences including adults.

Days after the shooting Marjory Stoneman Douglas students participated in a town hall where they and the parents of those who were killed in the shooting asked pointed questions to local and national leaders and a representative from the National Rifle Association. The link provided here demonstrates the young activists’ capacity to ask difficult questions, engage in dialogue about complex issues, and present themselves as active citizens with full social responsibility to each other and those who were shot. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sW6cXVzRnuo Parkland Town Hall Event (Cable News Network 2018)

The digital footage demonstrates that students did not sit passively but actively challenged leaders to change the ways that guns can be purchased in the United States. Senior student Ryan Deitsch took center stage asking,

‘We would like to know why do we have to be the ones to do this? Why do we have to speak out to the (state) Capitol? Why do we have to march on Washington, just to save innocent lives?’ (CNN 2018).

Students had prepared questions, actively participated in the debate and eventually some performed Shine, a song written by members of the Stoneman Douglas drama club in the live setting. Song lyrics called on other youth to participate alongside them:

‘If we all come together it will be alright, stand up for one another and we’ll never give up the fight.’

Mid-song the students used spoken work pleas to encourage other young people watching online to act with them to become

‘…the voice for those who do not have one’

Using the hashtag #StudentsStandUp young people across the country shared the song and the accompanying spoken word message on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other social media sites making the virtual spaces in which the video played as important as the live town hall. Interestingly, other student activist groups such as ZeroHour co-opted the hashtag to promote other protest opportunities. In the case of ZeroHour it was a climate change event. Theatre practitioners should again carefully note the fluency of theatrical meaning making that is demonstrated by the students— it is, in many ways, their first and natural language of political speech, and should encourage all of us to think about how we might do theatre with young people rather than for young people.

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Centennials can be socially conscious and politically aware and are often eager participants in both local and global conversations.

In the weeks following the shooting student protesters purposefully used their physical bodies, their voices, and social media platforms to emphasise the loss of other young people to gun violence and to marshal others in their cause. Marjory Stoneman Douglas students actively assumed the posture and the language of public protest in sentient and virtual spaces. They led and participated in rallies, debates, and marches. They also commanded attention on twitter, snapchat, reddit and other digital information distribution platforms. For example, two weeks after the shootings the Parkland students aided by the Women’s March Youth Empower Organisation coordinated a National School Walk Out event which invited students, administrators, parents, and allies from across the United States to walk out of their school for 17 minutes in honour of the 17 individuals who had lost their lives in the shooting and to commemorate other acts of gun violence in schools. Young people demanding change in school yards across the country joined in solidarity by walking out of their local schools. Their bodies and voices became a sign to those who held power locally. These images, taken by student activist Maeve Norton, are from the protest at my (then) seventeen-year-old twin daughters’ school, more than 2,500 miles distant from Parkland, Florida, where students spoke about civil liberties, personal responsibility and change in gun laws.

(Photos by Maeve Norton)

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Students collaborated digitally to share their local experience nationally. Using the hashtags #NeverAgain and #Enough student voices from New York and California and West Virginia, New Orleans, and Utah became a collective voice of protest. Major news outlets described the nationally coordinated action as

‘eloquent young voices, equipped with symbolism and social media savvy, riding a resolve as yet untouched by cynicism.’ (New York Times 2018)

Thousands of students acted with their bodies to build affective ties in a manner that should be acknowledged by theatre practitioners as consequential to our field and instructive to our practice.

Centennials can capably present and share their own authentic digital identities and are often aware of the ways that fans (and others) leverage their identity markers to further (protest) messages

In the weeks following the walk out, Marjory Stoneman Douglas survivor and senior student Emma González embodied the essence of the youth protest movement. Gonzalez, a Cuban American with nascent organising experience (she was the president of her School’s Gay-Straight Alliance), took the stage at the ‘March for Our Lives’ Rally in Washington D.C before hundreds of thousands of her young peers and other allies. Footage of the event provides evidence of the passionate ways in which students use their voice and their bodies to publicly share pain, witness humanity, and accompany others in their shared loss. In the following clip taken from the days long event González emerges as a powerful proxy for all that was lost at Marjory Stoneman Douglas. In this moment her voice represents the lives that were lost and the collective anguish youth and others associate with persistent gun violence that has gone unchecked in the United States:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u46HzTGVQhg Emma Gonzalez Speech (March for Our Lives 2018)

In this recording of the live event she eloquently reminds the audience of what was lost in the time in which her fellow students were gunned down. She began:

‘Six minutes and about 20 seconds. In a little over six minutes, 17 of our friends were taken from us, 15 were injured, and everyone, absolutely everyone, in the Douglas community was forever altered,’

González then went on to name each of the victims starting with her own lost friend and then expanded from her own personal loss to the losses of others:

‘Six minutes and twenty seconds with an AR-15 and my friend Carmen would never complain to me about piano practice. Aaron Feis would never call Kira, 'Miss Sunshine.' Alex Schachter would never walk into school with his brother Ryan…’

Article 6 No More Thoughts and Prayers 12 Drama Research Vol. 11 No. 1 April 2020 and so on until finally her rhetoric consisted of the name of a lost child paired with the phrase ‘never again’:

‘Alyssa Alhadeff would never. Jamie Guttenberg would never…. Meadow Pollack would never….’ and then Emma González stood silent for an excruciating 4 minutes.

Young people around the globe listened to González and immediately shared sound bites of her speech and also circulated images of her. They used her digital image to tell their own stories and to make their own statements. To fans (and others who were not fans) Emma became a symbol. Within hours they had remade her voice and image into an icon of their (various) protests, telling their own stories with her image. The images below are from an internet search of her name and depict the disparate ways in which her image was used over and over again to make meaning. While some images harken back to the themes of the original speech and others deride her each new reproduction and reimagining has added to her digital presence.

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The unmistakably theatrical conventions employed by Ms. González, and now attached to her very body and thunderously silent being, can, and are, dismissively interpreted as mere ‘political theatre.’ However, the ongoing digital presence and the associated prominence of those conventions should remind theatre practitioners of the enduring power and relevance of verbal and physical embodiment, and its new potentials for meaning making and relational communication far into the future.

Conclusion: Towards a ‘politics of relation’: Theatre with Young People or How Centennials Might be with Us

I began this article with a lengthy description of my own subjectivity, and to a certain extent our subjectivity as a field. However, Carrillo Rowe invites a new approach. She proposes that we long for something more inclusive and representative of the whole of who we should be. She calls her invitation a

‘signalling toward a process that places oneself at the edge of one’s self.’

She then describes us as

‘leaning and tipping toward the ‘others’ to whom [we] belong, or with whom [we] long to be—or those who are ‘[us]’’ (2005:17).

In the body of this paper I have laid out a few of the strong attributes I have observed in the young activists whose voices were elevated in the aftermath of the Parkland Florida shooting. I did this in an effort for us to explore together a small part of who

Article 6 No More Thoughts and Prayers 14 Drama Research Vol. 11 No. 1 April 2020 they are and through them to extrapolate about who other young people already are and how they might be prepared to fill our lack (and we theirs). Our fields of study— theatre education and professional theatre for young audiences—have always longed to be for children and youth. But I believe that our students, our young audiences, should no longer be situated at our borders, they should instead be with ‘us’ in the sense that Carrillo Rowe describes.

As I stated earlier engaged theatre/drama work that values youth voices are happening across the globe. However, the purposeful artistic work expressed by Megan Alrutz — who calls on us to think about artmaking as a space where we can

‘… explicitly take on the practice of coalitional consciousness-building, and thus [make] efforts toward collective accountability to one another’ (2015:111)

— is not currently practiced in all of our professional companies. Similarly, the intentional artmaking as public practice described by Stephani Etheridge Woodson in which she invites us to see performance as a

‘form of creative capacity building oriented specifically toward [co- collaborative] engagement in public and civic institutions and structures’ (2015:34) is not systemically carried out in all of our homes, schools, and communities.

With the healing our current world needs, now is the time for some personal and organisational checks—co-created with young people— to be considered.

To develop an effective inventory of our structures and our practice within those existing structural systems I propose that we borrow from the Positive Youth Development Models that were presented earlier in this paper to inform a set of questions that could help us in thinking about our personal and organisational practice. Here is a beginning list of questions that we might ask the members of our drama/theatre communities as we make efforts to navigate power relations and actively support authentic and empowering collaboration with youth.

• Are youth active agents in our programmes and in our creative work? How do we know? • Have we asked our youth what attributes and assets they carry within themselves already that they wish to actively contribute to our programmes and creative work? • What does meaningful participation and engagement that equally includes youth and adults look like in our programmes and in our creative work? • What does equitable power-sharing between youth and adults look and feel like in our programmes and in our creative work?

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• What evidence do we have that youth are valued and encouraged to participate in the design, delivery, and evaluation of our programmes and creative work? • How might youth and adults collectively discuss, critically reflect on, and implement necessary changes in our programmes and in our creative work? • What challenges and opportunities for youth empowerment are present in our programmes and creative work? • Is there room for youth and adult collaborators to practice resistance, self-righting, self-protection, and perseverance in our programmes and creative work?

This list of possible questions is a good start, but it is certainly not meant as a singular means through which we make a wholesale shift in our study and practice. In fact, when crafting it I am reminded of Michael Balfour’s posit that we must always be

‘re-considering the scale of the claims for change that are made about [theatre] practice.’

He advocates for ‘a theatre of little changes,’ a theatre practice that

‘provides a way to re-orientate what is possible about the work.’

And in this appeal for simplification provides a way to carefully consider our practice without requiring

‘change rhetoric, impact assessments and the strain for verifiable measurements’ (2009:355-356).

The questions then might simply be the way that we begin to answer Carrilo Rowe’s call by ‘leaning and tipping’ (2005:17) towards these young people with whom we have always already belonged.

Many Centennials have skills and perceptions and ways of being that are a bit foreign to me. They might also seem unfamiliar to you. But I do long to negotiate and create in digital settings. I want to be invited to the broader global conversation online and in person. And I am keenly aware that I need more socially conscious and politically aware allies who are deft at engaging in local and global digital dialogues. These are attributes and attitudes that many young people already have that could strengthen my theatre study and practice. My next steps in my own space are to engage on more equal footing with the Centennials in my home, in my school, and in my community, to see what they have to say about theatre and hear what they propose we should do about theatre in the world. I have confidence in these coming conversations because it seems the Centennials with whom I personally engage have a natural affinity for a language and meaning making process with which I am familiar. It seems, at least to me, that we have much to say to one another, and in our desire to speak a common language, we really should understand and value one another.

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References

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Vettraino, E., Warren Linds, W., and Jindal-Snape, D. (2017) Embodied voices: using applied theatre for co-creation with marginalised youth. Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties. 22:1, 79-95. DOI: 10.1080/13632752.2017.1287348 Woodson, S. E. (2015) Theatre for Youth Third Space. Chicago: Intellect. Yee, V. and A. B. (2018) National School Walkout: Thousands Protest Against Gun Violence Across the U.S. [online] Available from: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/14/us/school-walkout.html. [Accessed 17 June 2019] Youth.gov. (2019) Positive Youth Development Key Principles. [online] Available from https://youth.gov/youth-topics/positive-youth-development/key-principles- positive-youth-development [Accessed 15 December 2019]. Zimmerman, M. A. (2000) Empowerment theory: Psychological, organisational, and community levels of analysis. In Seidmann, J. R. E. (Ed.) Handbook of community psychology. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum.

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Notes on Author

Amy Petersen Jensen is a Theatre and Media Arts Professor at Brigham Young University where she currently serves as Senior Associate Dean in the College of Fine Arts and Communications. Amy has served as the Co-editor of the Journal of Media Literacy Education and the General Editor for the Youth Theatre Journal. She served on the leadership team for the revision and writing of K-12 National Core Arts Standards in the United States. Recent book publications include the Co-edited volume (Re)imagining Literacies for Content-area Classrooms (Teachers College Press), and Arts Literacies and Education (Routledge) with Roni Jo Draper.

Amy Petersen Jensen, Ph.D. Associate Dean College of Fine Arts and Communications Professor of Theatre & Media Arts Education A-501 HFAC Brigham Young University Provo UT 84602 [email protected]

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