Colleen Jaskulski, Theatre Educator, Wauwatosa East High School
This is the fifth in a series of Wisconsin Arts Educator interviews in honor of Arts Month 2024. The featured educators not only demonstrate excellent teaching but also innovative ideas.
Colleen Jaskulski has had a passion for theatre for as long as she can remember. She combined that with her love of teaching and obtained her degree in K-12 Theatre Education from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2017. She spent time during and after college working at Franklin High School both as an acting coach and eventually the musical director. Credits include Fiddler on the Roof, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, The Little Mermaid, and The Drowsy Chaperone. Colleen has also worked as a teaching artist for Forte Theatre Company as well as the Academy at Civic Theatre in Waukesha. Through these programs, Colleen develops students as both performers and creators through music, voice, and movement. When not teaching theatre, Colleen is one of the lead instructors for Glencastle Irish Dancers in Franklin.
I asked Colleen if she would be willing to answer a few questions about her innovative approaches to Theatre Education:
Chris: Many schools offer theatre as an ‘activity’ that takes place outside of the school day. Your theatre classes are offered as elective options during the school day. What benefit and impact does this have on your students?
Colleen: Our curricular theatre classes have been an incentive for our whole building. It gives students that want to pursue a career in theatre the opportunity to learn about the craft on a more in-depth level than they would after school and often gives them a leg up on their peers once they get to college-level theatre courses. More than that, though, theatre classes are a space to build connections with peers of all backgrounds and life experiences. The most powerful thing about these courses is the student diversity. I have a number of students with IEPs each year that take my classes, along with a diverse breakdown of gender and race. This I believe can be attributed to offering courses where any student, no matter what color, gender, socioeconomic background, or intellectual abilities they may be/have, can thrive as long as they are willing to be creative and take risks. Our students then develop skills in active listening, understanding, and empathy that they can carry with them into other aspects of their academic lives.
Chris: From your experience, how have you seen the importance of theatre education for your students?
Colleen: Twice a year, I get a new group of students in each of my classes, and each group has its own unique talents and challenges. Some of my acting classes are full of performers while others take some time to blossom. For the production and design courses, I will always have the students that could design a professional show tomorrow next to the students that tell me they aren't creative enough to participate fully in the course. My job, then, is to design lessons that will fit the needs of that particular group of students while still achieving the course's designated learning targets. By the end of the semester they have all realized skills within themselves that they didn’t know they had!
For example, halfway through the semester in Acting 1, students are assigned a summative Lip Sync Battle project in which they use the skills they have learned in voice and movement to create a character performance of a popular song they love. They write a monologue for their character based on the emotional journey of the song and then present a 2-minute movement piece lip syncing complete with costumes and props. The students take total ownership of this project and end up using the movement and voice skills that they built in the beginning of the semester. I then get to watch as students clap and cheer for one another performing to pop, R&B, country, rap, musical theatre, and heavy metal songs as characters that they have built. They get to use their own experiences, music taste, and skillset to create a performance piece that they can be proud to present to their peers. Even the students that might not have thrived in performances at the beginning are inspired to complete work that they choose, develop, and execute. This helps them to build lifelong skills that they don’t even realize they’re focused on and unlocks their creativity in ways they didn’t know possible!
Chris: What innovative ideas have you implemented into your classes and productions?
Colleen: One of the parts of our program that I am most proud of is our student-run extracurricular theatre program. The Players organization is vastly unique from most others in the area in that all of the crews are student-run and maintained. For each show, we have 25-50 students in the cast and another 100 students in either orchestra or stage crew. Many of these students will participate in multiple facets of the show throughout the process. When I say the crews are student-run and maintained, I mean it. We have crew heads for lights, sound, costumes, construction, fly, deck, makeup, marketing, playbill, and more that are in charge of putting together and running each performance. Being a student crew head involves a number of skills. They learn to create and maintain a work schedule for not only themselves but their crew members. They work with industry professionals that I hire to design and construct sets, costumes, props, and more. Most importantly, they act as leaders and liaisons for our program across the entire student body and greater Wauwatosa community and they train the next generation of students to take over their duties once they have graduated.
The space and this staff are merely facilitators of the students’ passion and creativity, and their ownership of these shows is what elevates them to the next level. They have a keen sense of detail, a commitment to excellence, and a love for each other that cannot be taught or explained, but just needs some cultivation and the space to prosper.
Here’s a list of just a few of the things that happened onstage over the last few years that came from our students:
Our construction and fly crews teamed up to make a fully-functioning rain system that dumped and recycled hundreds of gallons of rain per show for Singin’ in the Rain.
The incredible pit musicians for every show? 95% are high school students, many playing in a pit for their first time.
We designed, executed, and produced an entire musical (Bright Star) with the audience seated onstage under a 17-foot tall barn.
The fantastic Addams Family ancestor makeup and costumes that brought the story to life were all drawn up and executed by students.
The 2022 spring playbill with nearly 75 advertisements was a four-month long marketing campaign to earn enough ads for our Fester to shave his head in front of the whole club. All of these details remind me that when you give students the tools, they thrive.
Chris: What are you currently working on with your students?
Colleen: A few weeks ago, we began working on our last show of the year, Shrek the Musical. With 45 students in the cast, 25 in the pit orchestra, and over 100 crew members signed up, it is sure to be one of the biggest shows we’ve ever produced! On top of all that, we are working towards a second-semester student showcase for all the curricular theatre classes that will include a one-act performance presented by Acting 2 and Theatre Production & Design 2, a Comedy Sportz-style show by Improvisation, and a song-and-dance concert by Musical Theatre. The best way for students to show their growth and proficiency is through tangible performances, so that is our focus for the remainder of the year.
Chris: What challenges do you feel excited about in terms of your own teaching and/or student learning?
Colleen: The theatre industry is changing and technology is becoming a greater part of the art form. At the academic level, we are often behind on these trends and have to find ways to creatively produce shows and use equipment that we don’t have the resources for or do not yet understand. Although this can be frustrating at times, I find that it really forces the students (and myself) to develop creative problem-solving skills to achieve the same effects practically that projections and/or special effects technology can easily make happen on a Broadway stage. Additionally, curriculum numbers are growing! I have more students enrolled in theatre classes now than ever before, and although it makes lesson planning more difficult, it is exciting that interest in the art form and the work we’re doing is building!
REGISTRATION NOW OPEN for Summer Institute: Transforming Systems for Innovation
When: July 15–18, 2024
Where: Land O'Lakes (tentative)
Who: School teams of between 4–6 people, including (but not limited to) administrators, educators, and instructional leaders.
What: Through hands-on experiences, concurrent sessions, small-group discussion, networking, and reflection, school teams can joyfully explore ways to create their own pathways to hope. Participants will also receive implementation support throughout the 2024-25 school year through online sessions.
Topics include:
- Alternatives to Traditional Grading
- Culturally Relevant Instruction
- Flexibility within the Law
- Growing Hope
- Personalized, Competency-based learning
- and more…
Registration includes food and lodging. Limited to 60 participants. Registration priority will be given to school teams of between 4–6 people.
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Chris Gleason
Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction
This publication and previous issues are available from: Division of Academic Excellence> Teaching and Learning Team> Arts and Creativity. https://dpi.wi.gov/fine-arts/newsletter
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