Designed by CTG’s Education and Engagement department, P.L.A.Y., and supported by a grant from JP Morgan Chase Foundation, the Chase Theatre Educators Fellowship Program will award on an annual basis five fellowships to outstanding educators. The program is intended to help the educators build their capacity to teach and integrate theatre in their classrooms. The fellows will receive up to $5000 each, plus a $100 Chase gift card for post-fellowship class materials.
Five teachers have been selected for the inaugural year of the Chase Theatre Educators Fellowship Program, among them Jane McEneaney of Turning Point School, Culver City. Jane will be traveling to New Orleans to conduct documentary drama workshops with teenagers at the North Rampart Community Center in an effort to examine the real-life experiences of youth in post-Katrina New Orleans. Her plan is to elicit first-person accounts from the city’s youth, return to her theatre students at Turning Point School, and work with them to create a new play by and for middle school students. Jane further hopes to use computer technology to allow her Culver City students to perform with the students from New Orleans in this newly created script. Social justice and the Ubuntu philosophy (I am because we are) is a major component of her theatre curriculum and the Chase Fellowship is a perfect match for McEneaney’s mission as an educator.
