Teacher provides educational theater experience
The Partners in Arts and Learning program brought actor/playwright Jeri Pitcher to local schools.
By Samantha C. DePoy
Staff Writer

WILTON – Wednesday in Kim Alexander’s classroom, the moon is an 11-year-old, a spaceship is a plastic bottle of water and Jupiter can talk, and frequently does, warning those that it’s a gassy planet “So stay away!”

In Alexander’s classroom everyone is creative, focused, at times acting a bit zany, and throughout it all, pushing their imaginations to the limit.

But what is most important is students have found that learning and having a blast are not mutually exclusive and in fact, seem best when they go together.

That information has come thanks to the innovative antics of Jeri Pitcher of Readfield, who for the past four years has been SAD 9’s in-house theater buff.

She’s in local schools thanks to the Partners in Arts and Learning program, which is administered by Foothills Arts Center and funded mostly by the district with some seed money from the Maine Arts Commission.

Theater was chosen, as opposed to visual art or music, says Foothills Director Anne Geller, because there wasn’t a real drama program developed for K-8 students in SAD 9.

Theater, Geller points out, is accessible and can be tied to every area of the curriculum. Pitcher doesn’t have the students use props, except themselves, so Geller says, “Any classroom can become theater; you just push the chairs back.”

The resident playwright and an actor at the Theater at Monmouth, Pitcher wears a youthful grin and isn’t afraid to learn from the budding student-actors she works with, a trait that makes her teaching all the more powerful.

“I am an actor and a playwright, and I come in and they are just other actors and playwrights,” she said of the students. “It’s not like I am the teacher and they are the students. It’s not about me.”

Each summer she puts on a workshop for teachers to educate them on how to incorporate theater in the curriculum and then use it as an assessment tool. And then during the academic year, she’s back to do around five student workshops in classrooms of teachers who attended the summer session.

This year, Pitcher is in six district schools: Cascade Brook School, Mount Blue Middle School, Mount Blue High School, Mallett School, Cape Cod Hill School and the Academy Hill School, where she was on Wednesday morning, working with Alexander’s class of fifth-and sixth-graders.

Two weeks ago, Alexander’s students started a unit on space, and Pitcher’s goal on Wednesday is to fuse science and stage and rocket the students to a planet of fun.

The students lead the way, she said. She is just a guide.

They decided early on in the class period that each one would play an object in space, like a planet, a comet or the sun. Their teacher steers the space ship, a blue plastic bottle of water to each object, which respond by revealing a few facts about themselves.

Pitcher encourages them gently, often demonstrates an idea for an artistic movement and urging them to speak up and really develop their characters, like when she says, “If your planter was a person, what kind of person would it be?”

Twelve-year-old Cynthia Tyler, who has her arms rounded out in front of her to resemble the rings of Jupiter, takes the hint. “I am mostly made out of gases, so stay away from me,” she assertively warns to the spaceship.

Meanwhile across the room, Sam Marsh and Brandon Scott, who combine to make the sun, are flashing their fingers wildly about as they mimic solar flares.

“Make it real,” Pitcher urged a boy playing a comet. “Say, ‘I am a comet. I am space garbage,'” she declared.

By the time class was over, countless facts about space had been verbalized and performed. “It’s fun because you get to pretend like you’re something else,” said 12-year-old Brittany Miller, who played Mars. “You get distracted because it’s so fun and you forget that you’re learning, but then you remember again and it’s still fun.”

sdepoy@sunjournal.com

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