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"We Can Help!": Using Creative Drama to Explore Social Justice in

Youth Theatre

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ArtsPraxis
Volume 11 Issue 1
© 2024

“We Can Help!”: Using Creative Drama to Explore

Social Justice in Youth Theatre

MADDIE N. ZDEBLICK
COLLEGE OF EDUCATION, UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON,
SEATTLE
NOËLLE GM GIBBS
SAN JOSÉ STATE UNIVERSITY

ABSTRACT
Theatre can be a powerful tool for exploring social justice issues, but it
can also reproduce whiteness, ableism, and other systemic
oppressions. As theatre educators—constrained by many competing
demands on our time, resources, and energy—we want to know: how
can we leverage our teaching artistry to authentically explore social
justice issues with the young people and adults in our communities?
Speaking from our experiences at a nonprofit theatre in a majority-
white, upper-middle-class community, we offer creative drama as a
model for integrating this kind of social justice education into youth
musical theatre production camps. We explore the tools that creative
drama offers for supporting youth and teaching artists in exploring

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 Maddie N. Zdeblick and Noëlle GM Gibbs

issues related to inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility;

understanding our relationships with oppressive systems; and taking
action to transform them. Then, we demonstrate how this can look in
practice. We outline a process through which we developed two
creative drama adventures and share stories of how these dramas
unfolded. Finally, we surface some lingering tensions about our and
our students’ identities and how they inform our ongoing work. In
sharing these stories and tensions, we invite you to consider how
creative drama might support you and your communities.

Fifty kindergarten-through-eighth-grade students gathered after lunch

on the first day of our flagship musical theatre production summer
camp. It was time to get down to work on The SpongeBob Musical:
Youth Edition. Suddenly, Dr. Inkling, an octopus bearing a striking
resemblance to our theatre’s administrative assistant, burst into the
room covered in blue tape, desperate for assistance.
“Help! Help! Someone threw all this blue tape in my ocean and
now it’s stuck all over me!” Dr. Inkling cried. The kindergartners looked
shocked. The eighth graders giggled. Everyone’s eyes were glued to
Dr. Inkling, or “Inky” for short.
Earlier that morning, the camp had played a game of “The Wind
Blows” as an icebreaker activity. Each actor had been given a piece of
blue tape to mark a spot on the ground, and at the end of the game,
they had peeled up their tape and made a giant ball, which supposedly
made its way to the trash. However, when Dr. Inkling appeared, we
learned that the scraps of tape had found their way to the ocean! Soon,
we were hooked on this octopus’ drama and eager to help her solve
the problem of her increasingly polluted ocean—which was getting
worse! The Ocean Council, in charge of all major decisions, wanted to
build a giant hotel development right where Dr. Inky lived. This was
sure to make the pollution worse, but the Ocean Council did not want
to listen to Dr. Inky’s appeals. “We can help!” offered a student.
Summer camp staff acted surprised to see Inky, but of course,
they were expecting her. It was all part of the plan. But how did Dr.
Inkling—or the idea of her—make it to our intimate summer camp
stage in the first place (see Figure 1)? And how could this fictional
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Using Creative Drama to Explore Social Justice in Youth Theatre

octopus covered in tape help us explore social justice with our

students?

Figure 1: Maddie (left) facilitates a conversation between Dr. Inky (right) and PVTC
summer campers about the wasteful nature of theatre.

For many theater artists, the link between theatre and justice is
self-evident, expressed easily through cliché—theatre changes hearts
and minds, celebrates diversity, and invites everyone to speak their
truth. While there is truth in these truisms—theatre and the arts can
uplift counter-narratives (Gallagher et al., 2017), prompt critical
reflexivity (Tanner, 2018), and provoke empathy (Eisner, 1998; Troxler
et al., 2023)—there is also an underlying tension. Despite repeated
calls for change, the culture of theatre and theatre education in the
United States remains steeped in ableism and white supremacy (We
See You W.A.T., 2020; Zdeblick, 2023a). Constrained by ever-
intensifying and competing demands on our time, energy, and
resources, theatre educators want to know: What can we do, in our
settings, to shift this culture toward justice for all communities? How
can we bring young people along with us on our journey? And how can
the tools we already have as theatre artists support us in this work?
In this paper, we will explore how, through creative drama, a form
of scaffolded dramatic play (Ward, 1960), our nonprofit theatre has
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 Maddie N. Zdeblick and Noëlle GM Gibbs

connected our summer camp shows to issues of inclusion, equity,

diversity, and accessibility (IDEA). We have supported our
kindergarten through eighth-grade students (and our staff) in
developing age-appropriate understandings of systems of oppression,
investigating our relationships with these systems, and taking action to
reshape our community and the wider world. And, we have done so
alongside fast-paced rehearsal schedules that culminate in traditionally
polished and lively junior musicals. Integrating socially-engaged
creative drama into our curriculum has broadened and deepened our
work; yes, young artists leave our camps knowing more about theatre,
but, perhaps more importantly, they also leave seeing themselves as
change agents. We offer our work not as a one-size-fits-all model, but
as an example of how authentic social justice engagement might be
integrated into more mainstream theatre education curricula. While this
work can go deep—it usually goes deeper than we expect—all you
need to get started is one or two enthusiastic educators, a little bit of
time, whatever spare props and costumes you have lying around, and
a willingness to say “yes, and…”!
In the following sections, we will introduce ourselves and our
context before diving into some of the theory that animates our creative
drama work. Next, we will outline the steps of our process: selecting a
theme, facilitating staff learning, bringing in outside materials, creating
a story with a problem, interspersing episodes of the story throughout a
rehearsal process, and embracing the inevitable follow-up
conversations that arise with students. We will bring these steps to life
by sharing stories from two creative dramas that we facilitated
alongside more traditional musical theatre productions: The Drama of
Sprinkles the Unicorn (2022) alongside Frozen Jr. and The Drama of
Dr. Inkling the Octopus (2023) alongside The SpongeBob Musical:
Youth Edition. Then, we will surface some of the ongoing tensions that
we, two white nondisabled cis-female educators in a privileged
community, continue to hold as we engage in this work. Finally, we will
discuss what this model might offer other theatres and theatre artists
struggling to do it all—produce fun, vibrant, full-scale musicals and
engage students in meaningful social justice learning.

INTRODUCING OURSELVES AND OUR CONTEXT

Before we go further, we (Maddie and Noëlle), would like to introduce
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ourselves. Though we worked together to develop and facilitate the

creative drama adventures described in this article and share many
salient identities, we have distinct professional roles and perspectives.
We recognize that our identities influence the experiences we’ve had in
theatre education and that our perspective is just one perspective. We
are both deeply committed to social justice in theatre and theatre
education. The work we’re sharing with you played out at Portola
Valley Theatre Conservatory (PVTC), a nonprofit theatre whose
mission is to create community and inspire individuals to discover their
unique passion through pursuit of excellence in theatre arts. Most of
PVTC’s students and staff live within a 30-minute radius of Portola
Valley, a majority-white, highly-educated suburb of San Francisco, CA,
with a median household income nearly double that of the surrounding
metropolitan area.
I (Maddie) grew up fifteen minutes away from PVTC. I am a cis-
gender, straight, white, non-disabled woman, scholar, and teacher with
ten years of experience teaching theatre to disabled and nondisabled
youth and adults. My brother—who adores theatre—is labeled with
intellectual and developmental disabilities. As a result, I’ve spent much
of my academic and professional life focused on making inaccessible
theatre spaces more accessible. My whiteness and socioeconomic
privilege mean that I’ve experienced fewer barriers in this work than
someone holding different identities. I directed PVTC’s production of
Frozen Jr. in the summer of 2022 and returned to campus as a scholar
in residence in 2023 who, among other responsibilities, facilitated
PVTC’s IDEA initiatives for The SpongeBob Musical: Youth Edition.
I (Noëlle) have been in leadership at PVTC for fifteen years and
am currently the Executive Director. I produced the production of
Frozen Jr. that Maddie directed and, in the summer of 2023, I directed
SpongeBob: The Musical Youth Edition. Like Maddie, I am a straight,
white, cis-gender, non-disabled woman who grew up near PVTC. I
have always had my basic needs met and have had abundant access
to arts and education. Through my years at PVTC, I have witnessed
first-hand the transformative power of theatre by aiming to create a
space where our world expands through the act of storytelling and
empathy-building.
From its inception, PVTC has been committed to inclusive
practices, looking for ways to involve all members of the community in
the process of making excellent and transformative theatre. While we
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have anecdotal history to illustrate how this value plays out in practice,
like other theatres, we wanted to do more in the wake of 2020’s racial
justice uprisings. Motivated by the national call for accountability in
theatrical IDEA practices (We See You W.A.T., 2020) and our desire to
do more from our privileged space, PVTC grew serious about how
values of inclusion flowed intentionally through our curriculum.
Summer camp seemed like a great place to start. For one, students
are with us for an extended period, usually six to seven hours per day.
Unlike the school year, when we see students only once per week for
an hour or two, summer camp affords us the time to integrate co-
curricular activities into our programming that support the development
of a performance-based activity.

THEATER EDUCATION AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

We pause here to acknowledge the historically fraught relationship
between theater education and social justice learning. As previously
alluded to, scholars and activists have revealed the injustice of many
traditional actor training practices. Through reinforcing normative ideas
about which texts count as “canon” (Dyches, 2017), which stories and
acting methods are “universal” (Dunn et al., 2020), which casting
decisions are “colorblind” and “objective” (Schroeder-Arce, 2017),
which bodies and minds appear “neutral” (Sandahl, 2005), and which
voices sound “natural” and “free” (McAllister-Viel, 2021; Cahill &
Hamel, 2022), theater educators often reproduce whiteness and
ableism in our contexts (Zdeblick, 2023a). Despite what many theater
educators might say about our work’s inherent inclusivity (Brown,
2020), the link between theater and social justice is far from inevitable
(Finneran & Freebody, 2015).
However, research has revealed how, through making deliberate
pedagogical choices and engaging in ongoing self-reflection, theater
educators can further social justice goals. Syler and Chen (2017)
explored how, through considering students’ identities in casting
decisions, theater educators might support students’ positive racial
identity development. Horn (2017) described an applied theater project
in which Black boys developed and facilitated an interactive workshop
with local police officers that explored the racial dynamics of policing.
Winn (2012) explored how a playwrighting program supported formerly
incarcerated Black and Brown girls in navigating their relationships with
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Using Creative Drama to Explore Social Justice in Youth Theatre

systematic injustices. And Tanner (2018) described how his

predominantly white students analyzed and illustrated how whiteness
circulated within their own high school theater program. These
examples illustrate how—with a particular focus on racial justice—
theater educators have pursued social justice in their work. Scholars
have also explored adapting theater education for special and inclusive
education contexts, though much of this work has asked how theater
educators might help solve the problem of disability (see e.g., Bailey
2010; 2021). In better alignment with disability justice activism (Sins
Invalid, 2019), a smaller but growing body of research has instead
asked how theater educators might help solve the problem of ableism
(see e.g., Whitfield, 2022; Zdeblick, 2023b).
Against this tension-riddled—yet promising—theoretical backdrop,
we found ourselves wondering how to meaningfully engage our young
artists in social justice learning. In early 2022, I (Noëlle) was sitting at a
board meeting talking about how we might integrate IDEA into our
summer camp curriculum. To complicate things, our camp schedule
was already jam-packed. There was inherent tension in wanting to
expand our curriculum with justice, fully leaning into the joy, fun, and
discovery of that process, while also teaching vocal harmonies, sewing
costumes, rehearsing choreography, mastering transitions, training
high school tech interns, and having fun with water balloons and
popsicles. In our work with fifty students ranging in age from
kindergarten through eighth grade, we hoped to provoke more than
simple awareness. Our summer camp is located on the ancestral lands
of the Ohlone people. Like us, our teaching staff and students are
overwhelmingly white, upper or middle-class, highly educated, and
non-disabled. We wanted our students to reflect on their relationships
with difficult social issues, recognize their potential complicity, and
imagine changes they might make individually and together to make
the world a better, more just place. In other words, we hoped to
engage our young actors in critical consciousness-raising. Critical
consciousness (Freire, 1970), or understanding the social systems
shaping our world and our role in transforming them, cannot be learned
through passive listening. Instead, learners develop critical
consciousness through practicing agency, transforming what they’re
given into something new (Sannino et al., 2016).
The connection between theatre education and critical
consciousness-raising is well-established, particularly through Augusto
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Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed (1979). For example, in Forum

Theatre, a form of Theatre of the Oppressed, a team of actors presents
an audience (called “spect-actors” to emphasize their agency) with a
problem grounded in the real-life circumstances of their community.
When the problem is well-developed, the actors pause, inviting the
spect-actors to imagine how they might intervene to transform the
given situation. Spect-actors take turns trying out their ideas onstage,
building individual and collective capacity to transform their world.
Theatre of the Oppressed methods have been used to develop critical
consciousness among middle and high school students (Bhukhanwala,
2014; see e.g., Marín, 2007; Snyder-Young, 2011), teacher candidates
(see e.g., Bhukhanwala et al., 2017; Souto-Manning et al., 2008), and
teacher educators (see e.g., Stillman et al., 2019). However, we found
far less evidence for using Theatre of the Oppressed techniques with
students the age of our campers, some of whom were just five years
old.
We were talking about curriculum one day when we had a
lightbulb moment: every summer, our staff had a tradition of putting on
a weekly staff skit. We usually came up with a narrative framework that
paralleled the story we were exploring onstage and then dipped into a
mostly improvised “episode” of this skit weekly. The skit originated as
an opportunity for staff performers to model onstage behavior to
budding actors: cheating out, making physical choices, projecting
loudly, enunciating, making eye contact—all the skills we were working
on with young actors in rehearsal. I (Maddie) wondered, “Could the
staff skit be doing more?” Based on my past work, particularly with
Seattle Children’s Theatre, we turned to creative drama. In creative
drama, a form of improvisational role-play (Freeman et al., 2003),
teachers and students play characters and collaborate to tell stories
(Hallgren & Österlind, 2019). Critically, teachers endow students with
“the mantle of the expert,” meaning they position students in roles with
more expertise than those played by the teacher (Heathcote & Herbert,
1985). Teachers guide students back and forth from in-character
problem-solving to out-of-character reflection, and students’ agency
moves the plot forward. Since the 1960s, educators have recognized
creative drama’s potential to support students’ critical consciousness
development around social justice issues (García-Mateus, 2021). In
the words of Streeter (2017), creative drama can provide “a platform to
explore social issues and interrogate histories through embodied story-
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Using Creative Drama to Explore Social Justice in Youth Theatre

making, for both the facilitator and participant” (p. 88). By marrying
theatrical modeling with creative drama, the staff skit morphed into a
model for authentically integrating IDEA issues into our summer camp
programming.

THE MODEL
In the two summers that followed, we developed the following working
model. In this section, we will describe the process of developing two
creative drama adventures over two consecutive summers, The Drama
of Sprinkles the Unicorn (2022) and The Drama of Dr. Inkling the
Octopus (2023). Following Adelman and others (2020), we invite you
to consider how our identities as facilitators—and the identities of our
students—impacted the choices we made. As you read, we invite you
to learn from our experiences, taking up any practices that feel useful
for your contexts and leaving behind those that don’t.

Selecting a Theme
We always start our work by looking for themes that are authentic to
the plays we’re rehearsing. For example, when I (Maddie) directed
Frozen Jr., I thought about the character of Elsa and what she
represents. Elsa was born physically and cognitively different—with
magical powers—and raised to fear her differences. For this reason,
disabled viewers have hailed her as Disney’s “first disabled princess”
(Resene, 2017). Inspired by Elsa, and informed by my background as
a sister to a disabled brother and my research at the intersection of
theatre, disability, and education (Zdeblick, 2023b, 2023a), I chose to
explore Disability Justice (Sins Invalid, 2019) with my actors.
The following summer, when I (Noëlle) began working on The
SpongeBob Musical, two possible IDEA-themed lenses struck me. On
the one hand, I was interested in the xenophobia that Sandy Squirrel
encounters as a land mammal among sea creatures. With mounting
bias against immigration and general divisiveness within the US,
validating a character who had been “othered” felt like a theme we
could sink our teeth into. On the other hand, I was drawn to this idea of
environmental justice and of how theatre-making as a practice is or is
not sustainable. I began to wonder if we could produce an entire
summer made from old set pieces, found objects, thrifted clothing, and

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recycled materials. The theme would embrace not just conversations

about the ocean home of the characters living with Bikini Bottom, but
also push PVTC towards more sustainable design and build practices.
Another struggle that we—like so many other small theatres—face is a
lack of storage space, so we find ourselves throwing away materials at
the end of a production. What if we ended with less waste? Could we
avoid ordering the dumpster at the end of camp? I floated the
sustainability idea at our next production meeting and asked Maddie if
sustainability could even fall within the IDEA umbrella. Maddie gave an
enthusiastic “yes” and began talking about how environmental harms
disproportionately impact the same populations who often experience
racism and other forms of systemic injustice.

Facilitating Staff Learning

Once our themes are selected for each summer, we immerse our
entire summer camp staff in learning. For Frozen Jr., this looked like
engaging the whole staff in conversations about how ableism, the
system that ascribes value to bodies and minds based on their
proximity to constructs like “normal” (Lewis, 2022), showed up on our
campus. It also looked like exploring Carolyn Lazard’s Accessibility in
the Arts: A Promise and a Practice (2019), a guide to creating more
accessible art spaces. Since 2015, PVTC has always done a sensory-
friendly “Access Preview” of all of our summer camp musicals, so
disability was already on our minds. However, we knew we could go
further, especially in terms of thinking about how ableism (and racism)
showed up in our teaching when we praised certain ways of being and
discouraged others.
For The SpongeBob Musical: Youth Edition, staff researched ways
in which they could embrace sustainability in their designs and
lessons. Our props designer mined our craft storage areas for supplies
and drew from those for every project rather than purchasing new
ones. She built Sandy’s “Erruptor Interrupter” jetpack out of a
cardboard box with empty paper towel rolls standing in for the
propulsion jets, and bits of scrap ribbon as shoulder straps. She
decorated it with paper scraps and paint. The prop looked awesome
and did not waste any new materials. Our costume designer similarly
explored existing costume stock and built pieces out of scrap fabric
and existing pieces where she could. Our set designer collected bottle
caps and used them to adorn a ship’s steering wheel that was
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mounted to the front of the set. Staff had significant buy-in, even before
the campers arrived!

Finding Outside Resources

The second step is to search for additional story materials to help even
our youngest campers connect our production to our chosen IDEA
theme. For Frozen Jr., we selected the picture book, Not Quite
Narwhal (Sima, 2017). In this story, a young unicorn, raised by
narwhals, grows up feeling isolated by his differences. When he
stumbles across a family of unicorns, he discovers his identity.
However, rather than stay with the unicorns, he returns home,
determined to find a way to live his truth surrounded by the narwhals
he loves. I (Maddie) saw this narwhal’s journey as a disability narrative,
parallel to Elsa’s. I hoped even our five-year-old campers would
understand how this narwhal felt out of place, not through a fault of his
own, but through a genuine mismatch between his body and his
environment.
For SpongeBob, the perfect book, Fur and Feather Stand
Together (Griswold, 2020), fell into our lap. The story spoke to the
SpongeBob team immediately, as it is told from the perspective of “two
unlikely friends—a puffin and a polar bear—joining together with their
community to save the ice that is melting around them.” The authors
provide resources for teachers in classrooms to use the material and
speak about why they as white people centered an indigenous young
woman as their main human character. The book, both in theme and
the ways it advocates beyond itself, aligned perfectly with the IDEA
values we wanted to explore alongside SpongeBob.

Creating a Parallel Problem

Once we have selected a theme and engaged our staff in learning, we
next create what we call “a parallel problem,” a term I (Maddie)
borrowed from Seattle Children’s Theatre’s Story Drama curriculum.
Our goal is to create a problem that is related to, yet distinct from, the
problems in the various source materials we’re using, so that we can
engage students in using their expert knowledge of our source
materials to help a character solve it. For example, both Elsa in Frozen
Jr. and the unicorn in Not Quite Narwhal experience feeling out of
place in their communities. Inspired by this, we developed the

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character of Sprinkles, a unicorn (played by our delightfully expressive

assistant choreographer, see Figure 2) who was unable to attend
school with his fellow sea creatures because his body wasn’t made to
swim.

Figure 2: Sprinkles the Unicorn (horn “hidden” underneath a rainbow top hat) arrives
at PVTC.
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To explore sustainability alongside SpongeBob and the characters

from Fur and Feather Stand Together, we turned to Dr. Inkling, the
Octopus from our opening scene whose ocean had been invaded by
blue tape. We learned from Dr. Inkling that she had spent her whole
life researching ocean health, but was ignored by the Ocean Council,
the rulers of the sea. Not only had our students’ wasteful ways
disturbed her in her retirement, but the Ocean Council was about to
approve plans for a new, massive, wasteful underwater hotel. She
desperately needed our students’ help. Like SpongeBob, Dr. Inkling
didn’t feel strong enough to overcome this challenge on her own.

Activating the Story

The next step in our process is to bring our story to life and engage
students in solving the parallel problem. To launch each adventure,
one or more teaching artists perform a 30-45 minute initial scene, with
lots of audience engagement, to get our students excited. Usually, at
least one other teaching artist participates out-of-character, mediating
discussion between the characters onstage and the students. The
scene doesn’t have to be polished—we often write a short script that
teaching artists have in hand and use as a jumping-off point for
improvisation. When the scene ends, students are left with both an
understanding of the problem and a hint of their role in it. Through
three or four additional episodes, teaching artists and students work
together to bring the problem to a climax and navigate its resolution. In
these intermediate scenes, students try to solve the problem. As
teaching artists, we say “yes, and…” to their agency and activate the
consequences! Importantly, all of their attempts work (remember that
they are the “experts”), but not completely. They leave some part of the
problem unsolved; to resolve it completely, students must invite the
main character of our creative drama to their show. Sometimes, we
add co-curricular ways for students to engage with the problem in
smaller groups with similar-aged peers. Finally, once students have
performed, they meet with the main character one last time to arrive at
a resolution. To explore what this looks like in practice, let’s dive into
The Drama of Sprinkles the Unicorn and The Drama of Dr. Inkling the
Octopus!

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The Drama of Sprinkles the Unicorn.

Remember Sprinkles, the unicorn growing up amongst sea creatures,
distraught because he couldn’t attend underwater school with his
friends? Sprinkles came to PVTC looking for help, but when the
students revealed they were producing a play, he panicked, thinking a
theatre wouldn’t be accessible for him either! Our students, who
immediately recognized their own role in creating a space that didn’t
work for Sprinkles, were hooked. Though Sprinkles left this first
episode in tears, he soon returned. Students suggested that he try
wearing a costume—maybe if he looked more like a sea creature, he’d
feel more at home with his peers. In walked another teaching artist, our
costume designer! Speaking in a voice oddly reminiscent of Edna
Mode, from The Incredibles, she informed Sprinkles in no uncertain
terms that his tail would have to go. Our students rushed to Sprinkles’
defense. In the words of one early elementary schooler, Sprinkles
should “keep all of his body parts.” He shouldn’t have to change
himself to belong. Instead, the world should change to welcome all of
Sprinkles’ intersecting identities.
The next time Sprinkles returned, I (Maddie) produced the book,
Not Quite Narwhal, as a resource that might help us solve our problem.
Sprinkles and our students listened with rapt attention as I read. When
the story ended, Sprinkles was inspired, but he felt he needed one
more story about community transformation and to get up the courage
to return home. Our students suggested he attend a performance of
Frozen Jr., but again, the issue of accessibility arose. Unicorns don’t
often sit still in seats and quietly watch theatre. And they’re often afraid
of the dark. The students immediately thought of inviting Sprinkles to
our Access Preview. Around this time, our youngest students began to
beg for more time with Sprinkles. They were exhausted from
rehearsals, and as it turned out, a social justice storytime with
Sprinkles was just the thing to rejuvenate them for performances. After
Sprinkles saw our show—which he loved—he felt brave enough to go
back to the ocean and demand his friends welcome him as his full and
complete self (See Figure 3).

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Figure 3: Inspired by the students, Sprinkles returns to the ocean to see his narwhal
friends.

In our last scene, Sprinkles returned to the ocean, only to find his
friends trapped in a thick sheet of ice. The students suggested that
maybe the very thing that made Sprinkles different (his unicorn horn)
and his love for his community could thaw the ice. Referencing Frozen
Jr., a student called out, “Love will thaw!” It worked! And, more
importantly, Sprinkles and his community learned to appreciate that the
differences in their bodies and minds made them stronger. They could
find a way to move together.

The Drama of Dr. Inkling the Octopus.

A year later, Dr. Inky stumbled into our theatre, covered in blue tape,
distraught over our campers’ wastefulness and her superiors’
indifference to ocean health. When Dr. Inky learned that students were
rehearsing a play, her anger intensified. Theatre was so wasteful! For
the health of the planet, theatre should be abolished. Our students
resisted—there had to be a way to keep doing theatre, but more
sustainably. Dr. Inkling reluctantly agreed to stay her judgment, but
only if the students worked together to imagine more sustainable ways
of making theatre. She said she’d be back next week to check in on
their progress. Now our students had a problem to solve: How could
the choices they made in the next four weeks of camp impact Dr.
Inkling’s life for the better and rehabilitate theatre? In small groups, the
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students set to work.

First up, the campers went on a sustainability scavenger hunt
across the PVTC campus. They noticed details that were
environmentally friendly (e.g., recycling bins everywhere, a water
fountain where reusable water bottles could be refilled) and places that
needed work (e.g., a lack of compost, aerosol cans for spray painting).
Subsequent small-group conversations varied based on the ages of
campers involved. For example, our youngest students researched the
rules about what could and could not be recycled, while our middle
schoolers discussed the reasons for the issues they observed on
campus (e.g., convenience, lack of services), their impacts on climate
and ocean health, and the lower-income communities of color
disproportionately affected by these impacts. In the second episode of
our creative drama, impassioned campers reported their findings to me
(Noëlle) and other members of the leadership team, demanding
change. To motivate the next stage of our drama, the leadership team
admitted students’ observations were excellent, but their demands
were overwhelming! We were too busy supporting their show to take
on anything extra. To gather ideas on how to build a movement in the
face of resistance, students turned to Fur and Feather Stand Together.
Inspired by the story, a group of middle schoolers wrote a rap about
the importance of using sustainable materials in our design practices.
Elementary schoolers wondered about transitioning more of our
lighting instruments to LEDs and suggested we raise money to replace
our traditional fixtures. The camp co-authored a letter to our local
waste management facility requesting that they consider offering
composting service in our area (see Figure 4). All campers made
posters celebrating sustainable practices.

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Figure 4: Students’ letter to the local waste management agency, requesting compost
pickup for our campus.

Students presented their work to the leadership team, which

“convinced” us of sustainability’s importance. Together, we started
making small changes around campus. Inky was thrilled to hear about
this progress when she returned to PVTC. She was so inspired that
she built up the courage to go back to the Ocean Council to advocate
against the hotel development in her ocean (see Figure 5). But the
council did not budge! They believed their project signified progress,
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the way of the future! That is, of course, until the campers invited the
Ocean Council to come see SpongeBob. Sitting in the audience of
SpongeBob, the Ocean Council learned how even the littlest creature
can make a big difference. After the show, the Ocean Council
announced that they would be ending their ocean development project,
to the joy of Dr. Inky! Through sharing their stories, onstage and off,
students helped Dr. Inky change hers— and made our campus more
sustainable along the way.

Figure 5: Dr. Inky advocates her case to the Ocean Council.

Following Up
Inevitably, when we explore challenging issues with young people,
they bring up challenging questions. These questions might surprise
us, make us uncomfortable, or even force us to confront our own
practices and complicity in systemic injustices. When these questions
arise, it can be tempting to brush them aside with the excuse that we
don’t have time to explore them fully. As educators, it is our
responsibility to be brave and make that time. Maybe it’s after our
show has opened, maybe it’s in small group conversations with
students who aren’t in a particular rehearsal, but these questions
deserve our full attention. If we let them, students’ questions can
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transform the heart and soul of our work in profound and meaningful
ways.
For example, when I (Maddie) was directing Frozen Jr., a middle
schooler interrupted rehearsal one day with some tough questions
about mental health and accountability. From our creative drama, she
knew that Elsa hadn’t intended to freeze Arendell—she acted out of
anxiety and shame about her physical and cognitive differences—but
ultimately, Elsa had still caused harm. Why were we ok with crowning
her queen? I panicked. I had forty kindergarten through eighth-grade
students onstage learning the blocking for our show’s finale. However,
rather than shut this student down, I took a breath, emphasized what a
good question she had, and promised to return to it soon. After their
show had opened, I gathered all but the kindergarten students together
onstage. We sat in a circle and discussed her question. Ultimately, we
agreed she was right. While Elsa hadn’t intended to cause harm, she
had. And, by the end of the story, she was likely still dealing with
trauma. I wondered aloud, “What might be a better resolution for Elsa
than becoming Queen?” An eighth grader responded tentatively,
“Therapy?” The rest of the circle cheered, “Therapy!”
In The Drama of Dr. Inkling the Octopus, students asked hard
questions that demanded an immediate response. Recall how students
worked in groups to conduct a sustainability scavenger hunt across the
PVTC campus. On their journey around campus, a group of our
students observed our set designer cutting styrofoam in the parking lot.
As he chiseled out large cartoon flowers to attach to our set, tiny bits of
white foam floated everywhere. The students were horrified. Maybe Dr.
Inkling was right. Theatre was terrible for the planet! As a staff, we
were embarrassed and ashamed. Students had caught us failing at
exactly the thing we were trying to do. After camp, a core group of our
staff came together to respond. We determined that our set designer
had likely thought he was using a sustainable form of styrofoam, based
on the product’s advertising. We devised a plan to clean up the
styrofoam and created a new policy explicitly banning styrofoam from
new design projects. However, as the flowers had already been cut,
we determined that the most sustainable thing we could do was use
them. We apologized to our students and explained our plan for
moving forward. Ultimately, we all learned a valuable lesson about
moving towards justice: mistakes happen. It is our job to own them,
learn from them, and find a way to move forward.
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TENSIONS AND CHALLENGES

Even as we’ve learned so much from these creative drama
adventures, questions remain. For one, we continue to wonder about
our role as facilitators of these dramas. We know how important it is to
center marginalized voices in social justice learning; as straight, white,
nondisabled women, should we be the ones leading these dramatic
explorations? While we don’t have an answer to this question, here are
some of our ongoing thoughts. First, we welcome all of our summer
camp teaching artists to help develop these dramas, but few hold
marginalized identities (a symptom of systemic inequality in our
organization and theatre more broadly). While we’re actively working to
diversify, we don’t want to tokenize our current teaching artists of color
by assuming they want to lead our community in this work. We’re
cautious about using our positionalities as excuses for avoiding difficult
and uncomfortable work or pawning off the work on others. As those
who’ve benefited from systems of oppression, we know we have a
responsibility to help dismantle them. We’ve tried to navigate this
tension by drawing from books and other inspirational source materials
created by marginalized artists (e.g., Not Quite Narwhal) and that
support organizations led by marginalized peoples (e.g., 50% of the
proceeds from sales of Fur and Feather Stand Together go to three
nonprofits working towards climate justice: The International
Indigenous Youth Council, Center for Biological Diversity, and Sunrise
Movement). By doing so, we’ve tried to center marginalized voices
without shirking our responsibility to act toward change.
We also continue to wrestle with how to empower our (majority
nondisabled, otherwise privileged) students to see themselves as
changemakers without reproducing white, nondisabled savior
narratives. While we again cannot pretend to answer this question,
we’ve tried to attend to it through constructing parallel problems that
illustrate our and our students’ complicity in systems of oppression. For
example, in The Drama of Sprinkles, our students were complicit in
excluding Sprinkles from attending Frozen Jr., as they had not thought
about how inaccessible it might be for a unicorn. In The Drama of Dr.
Inkling, our students had littered the tape that had traveled to the
ocean and attached itself to Dr. Inky’s tentacles. Through these
creative choices, we’ve tried to help students see themselves not as
outsiders, sweeping in to solve social justice problems, but as insiders,
deeply entangled with these problems’ existence. We’ve also been
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intentional about the kinds of stories we tell. While choosing

inspirational source material for The Drama of Dr. Inkling, we were
drawn to We Are Water Protectors (Lindstrom, 2020), a beautiful
picture book about a young indigenous girl standing up to protect
Earth’s waters. However, when we considered this story, we struggled
to imagine a parallel problem that would result in something other than
our (privileged) students “discovering” the importance of protecting
Earth’s waters, a practice that indigenous communities have
understood since time immemorial. Ultimately, we did not feel we could
engage this story responsibly, so we chose another direction. Though
we have not yet done this for a creative drama, we have also hired
cultural consultants to lead lessons that our staff, given our identities,
could not appropriately facilitate (e.g., for our 2018 production of Mulan
Jr., we brought in two consultants who taught students about elements
of Chinese culture). This might be another option for theatres
interested in exploring a particular theme, but who lack the lived
experiences to do so responsibly. Finally, at the end of our dramas,
we’ve tried to avoid giving our students too much closure. We want
them to feel as if they’ve helped someone navigate systems of
oppression, not that they’ve “solved ableism” or “solved climate
injustice.” These are pervasive systems; we cannot “solve” them in a
four-week summer theatre camp (or perhaps ever). However, we can
begin to see ourselves as entangled with these systems and capable
of resistance.

CONCLUSION
To help our summer camp community authentically learn about IDEA
issues and resist systems of oppression, PVTC has turned to creative
drama adventures. Through multi-episode, interactive stories like The
Drama of Sprinkles and The Drama of Dr. Inkling, our students and
staff have learned about systems of injustice, acknowledged our
complicity in these systems, and practiced leveraging our agency
towards change. We’ve seen students engage in this critical-
consciousness with passion and joy, developing artwork (e.g., the
sustainability rap) and begging for more time with our creative drama
characters (e.g., Sprinkles’ popularity with our Kindergartners). And,
our creative drama adventures have supported our other summer
camp goal: producing high-quality musical theatre performances with
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 Maddie N. Zdeblick and Noëlle GM Gibbs

our kindergarten through eighth-grade youth. While we continue to

grapple with ongoing tensions, we offer our story in the hopes it might
support other nonprofit theatres and theatre educators interested in
exploring social justice issues with students but unsure about how to
begin.
Nothing that we do as theatre educators will “solve” systems of
oppression, but we hope you’ll join our students in recognizing how
“We can help!” Incorporating creative drama adventures into your
existing educational theatre programming might be a good place to
start.

SUGGESTED CITATION
Zdeblick, M.N., and Gibbs, N.G.M. (2024). “We can help!”: Using
creative drama to explore social justice in youth theatre.
ArtsPraxis, 11 (1), pp. 14-38.

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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES
Maddie N. Zdeblick (she/her) is a teaching artist, theatre director, and
PhD candidate in education at the University of Washington Seattle.
Maddie is passionate about Disability Justice, educational equity, and
innovating new theatrical forms with learners of all ages and abilities.
She is also the founding Artistic Director of Parachute Players, a
multisensory, immersive theatre company. Maddie holds a master's in
education from the University of Washington Seattle and a bachelor’s
in Theatre and Sociology from Northwestern University, with a focus in
Theatre for Young Audiences. She is a 2019 graduate of the
Washington State Teaching Artist Training Lab.

Noëlle GM Gibbs (she/her) is an interdisciplinary theatre-maker,

educator, and writer living in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the
Executive Director of Portola Valley Theatre Conservatory where she
produces plays, musicals, and devised works with community
members aged 3-103. Additionally, Noëlle has worked as a freelance
director, choreographer, and teaching artist in regional theatres, local
nonprofit spaces, and in public and independent schools across
California. Noëlle holds dual BAs in Theatre & Dance from UC San
Diego and is currently working towards her MFA in Creative Writing at
San José State University.
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