AMHERST — Holyoke’s Enchanted Circle Theater has landed a $10,000 grant from AEC Trust for its work in Amherst-Pelham Regional Schools.
For a decade, the nonprofit theater has been collaborating with Amherst elementary schools to put on programs that bring together social studies education and theater. In addition to putting on productions as a professional theater company, the organization also hosts educational programs throughout western Massachusetts.
In Amherst schools, teaching artists on the theater’s staff collaborate with teachers to plan multi-day programs in fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms.
Instead of just reading textbooks about events like the Battle of Lexington, fifth-graders get to be a part of them. The fifth-grade program allows students to write and perform a play about the American Revolution based on short scenes.
“You care about the material when you write it,” said Priscilla Kane Hellweg, executive artistic director of Enchanted Circle Theater.
The fourth-grade program focuses on issues of immigration and migration, delving into questions such as why people leave their homelands. It typically breaks up the process of migration into a few steps, Hellweg said, posing questions to students about why they would leave their homeland and what items they would bring with them.
“It’s very much about stepping into someone else’s shoes and experience through empathy,” she said.
Fourth-grade students also create “choreo-poems,” a poem with accompanying choregraphy, that they perform in a culminating presentation.
Last year Carrie Doggett’s fifth-grade Fort River classroom recreated scenes from American Revolution-era paintings. She said the program always culminates in a performance.
“Students, I think, get to take pride in producing something and producing something collaboratively,” she said. “It’s a powerful part of their learning.”
A highlight for Doggett: “I guess it’s getting to take the history, which in some ways is stuck on paper for some of the students, and to in their own words think about the themes that are very relevant too — themes about power and leadership and decision making and the power of the people.”
Those themes, she says, are still relevant today.
In the past, Amherst-Pelham Regional Public Schools funded the program, but this year with school budget constraints, the school wasn’t sure if they would be able to offer it, said Hellweg. The AEC grant, which was awarded in September, will help make the program possible. Hellweg said they are still getting $2,000 from the school district, and they are working to raise $2,000 more from local businesses. AEC Trust, the organization who awarded the grant, is a private foundation that supports a range of causes including education, arts and the environment.
Sometime in the second half of this academic year, the theater is planning to work with 18 fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms in Wildwood, Crocker Farm, Fort River, and Pelham elementary schools. Hellweg said the organization hopes to make arts integration the norm in public schools as a way to engage with students.
Greta Jochem can be reached at gjochem@gazettenet.com