Project 1, Lerini Giana
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Wayne State University *
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3010
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English
Date
Jun 5, 2024
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docx
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1
Giana Lerini
K.M. Begian Lewis
English 3010 Sec. 007
January 27, 2024
Researching the Discourse Community of High School Theater Teachers
At this point in my life my major field of study is theater with a focus in acting. My long
term goals are to get a teaching degree so that I am qualified to teach theater at least at the high
school level. I am currently in my second year of studying theater and I have performed,
designed, directed, etc. in shows since I was eleven years old. So since this will be my ninth year
having been involved in this field in some way. I already know a lot about this field of work. I
have worked with many directors and each time I find that there are techniques that I really love
about them and others that are not so great. So I hope to combine all of my favorite techniques
that I have learned and establish the best learning environment for a student as possible, whilst
also producing good quality theater. I know that this position will most likely require me to
teach some form of theater or acting class during the day, and then after school I will be required
to direct at least two productions a year. I am interested in this field because I have done so
many shows at many different theaters, majority of the time with directors who were mean and
did not care about student’s well-being in the long run. I want to provide students with a safe
environment that will encourage them to develop a love for the arts. I know that in order to be
really successful in this field I will need to be able to not only produce good quality shows and
be a good teacher in the classroom, but I will also have to deal with the parents of students as
well as students themselves who will want to speak with me about class or about a production.
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Seeing as this is a field with the arts, and a lot of times people’s emotions get involved, I will
need to communicate clearly and with compassion. In order to find out what professionals in my field research and write about, I plan to
interview my father, who is the president of the worker’s union of my younger sister’s school
district, on what teachers research and write about. As well as who they speak to on a daily basis.
I also plan on researching online and trying to find some type of article or website that will
provide some insight to who I will be speaking to. My main question is how communicating with
different groups of people in this job will differ. Between the other teachers in the school and the
parents of the kids it will be a very wide range of the people and type of communication I will
need to have with everyone. After having researched this question I have come to the discovery
that my main concern should be to learn how to constantly change the way in which I
communicate with people based on the circumstances and how the interaction is going. Such as
emailing the principal will be a very different interaction from seeing another teacher that I know
in the hallway. First I started looking for different websites or articles or websites that might provide me
with some insight. When I went to search the question “theater teacher discourse community”
the very first thing to pop up was exactly the kind of article I was looking for. The article
“Community through Discourse: Reconceptualizing Introduction to Theatre” by Amy Hughes
talks about the different ways that theater teachers communicate in a classroom setting and what
the best ways to do that are. Granted this specific article is aimed to be used in a college setting,
after looking at it the basic ideas can be useful for any theater educator. The first thing is that the
teacher should not be the main focus but instead should be a facilitator and fellow learner
(Hughes. 87) This is really interesting to me because it really showcases the differences between
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learning about a set in stone topic, such as math, and teaching students about the arts. The arts
are so special because it is so subjective and every student may have a different opinion. I
thought that the general argument of this article was really interesting because it talked about
how to teach theater in a more productive way than the traditional forms of teaching, specifically
in American school systems. I then broadened my research when I looked for specifically “teacher discourse”. My
thought process behind this was that a theater teacher would most likely have to adhere to the
normal rules of discourse as any other teacher in a high school. I found another article entitled
“Elementary School Science Teachers Discourse and on the Job Learning About Student
Motivation” written by Wisam Sedawi, Livat Eschar-Netz, Hasida Yakovov, and Dana Vedder-
Weiss. They bring up the idea that teaching requires a lot of on the job training (Sedawi et al.
2326) After thinking about this it actually made a lot of sense, as each school district has
different rules and different expectations, as will the staff of the school itself. As a teacher you
will send emails to the principal of the school as well as the other teachers in your school and
district. Also each class of students is different so you have to be able to be able to read them and
their personality as a whole so that you are able to provide them with the most information in the
clearest way for them. Finally I was able to interview my father on who teachers normally interact with on a day
to day basis. His answers to my questions basically confirmed what I had already assumed about
the discourse community by saying that teachers normally communicate with “other teachers,
students, parents, the principal, and a social worker”(Lerini). I was a bit surprised to see that high
school teachers would communicate with a social worker, but after thinking about it I understand
why. High school teachers have to deal with so many personalities of students. I can only
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4
imagine that it would sometimes be helpful to talk to a social worker about how to handle a
difficult personality. Also I discovered that the kind of communicating that I would need to do
with the social worker of a school would be vastly different from how I would interact with
another teacher, as that would most likely be less formal
Through this process I discovered that communicating with the teaching discourse
community will be very broad and I will need to be able to have informal conversations as well
as send a very eloquent email to a principal or superintendent. The thing that interested me the
most is that I will need to think on my feet a lot in this job because the discourse community is
so vast. I will need to communicate with such a wide array of people in so many different ways
including face to face as well as through email and over video as well. Overall the basic idea of
the discourse community for teachers is that you need to be quick on your feet to change the way
that you talk to people for the different groups that you will be interacting with.
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Works Cited
Hughes, Amy, et al. “Community through Discourse: Reconceptualizing Introduction to
Theatre.” Theatre Topics
, no. 1, Project MUSE, Mar. 2006, pp. 85–101. Crossref
,
doi:10.1353/tt.2006.0008.
Lerini, Alfredo.
Interview,
conducted by Giana Lerini on January 25th, 2024
Sedawi, Wisam, et al. “Elementary School Science Teachers’ Discourse and <scp>on‐the‐job</Scp> Learning about Student Motivation.” Journal of Research in
Science Teaching
, no. 10, Wiley, Mar. 2023, pp. 2321–60.
Crossref
,
doi:10.1002/tea.21861.
6
Reflection
I struggled to put this project at the top of my list because this discourse community and
job is something that I have grown up around so I already knew a lot of what is expected of it. I
also had a lot of projects and papers that were all due within these first three weeks of classes for
the new semester so remembering to actually do this paper was a challenge in and of itself. I am,
however, proud of myself for pushing through and managing my time well in order to not only
get all of my work done for school but also have time for myself where I can take a break and
relax. I hope to maintain this plan throughout the semester where I am able to get my work done
as well as have a healthy balance of rest. Regardless of the fact that I already know quite a bit
about the job itself, I am glad that I was able to research the specifics of it, as well as ask
questions about what will be expected of me. A lot of what I researched in this project was
topics I already know about the job, but it was helpful to reinforce this knowledge with the
articles I read and the people that I spoke to. I plan to utilize the information that I gathered and
start actively working on bettering my communication skills in the professional setting. For
example getting better at sending emails, as this will be something that I will need to do quite
frequently as a theater educator. As I move forward this semester I want to continue to manage
my time, as I know that once I get to the end of March and all of April it is going to be the
busiest time ever for me because I am in a musical that Wayne State is doing. This will be
difficult for me but it is also why I wanted to start practicing these skills now so that I am a
master at them come March and April.
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