Creating Supportive Feedback Practices to Address Applied Theatre Students’ Anxieties in a Higher Education Course

Abstract

This article explores the ways in which two years of increased isolation due to COVID affected a cohort of applied theatre students and how their instructors addressed students’ elevated anxiety and disconnection from community. In the spring semester of 2022, I was working as the teaching intern for the course Applied Theatre Praxis taught by Professor Joe Salvatore at New York University. The students—who ranged from undergraduate upperclassmen majoring in Educational Theatre to doctoral students in various arts disciplines—were required to facilitate an applied theatre residency project with a community to which they were connected in some way. Students responded to having to work with one of their own communities with acute anxiety: many claimed they were not part of a community. This group response was due to a complex web of factors stemming from two years of increased isolation due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article, I will describe the teaching strategies Professor Salvatore and I used to help students overcome this anxiety by creating opportunities to rehearse and reflect on their facilitation practices and grounding student-facilitators in their values.