Memo #2 "Art is a Personal Adventure"

When I dove into the scholarly world to find what the experts were saying about my topic, I found little to be discovered. Their were very few articles and essays written on playwriting in the classroom. I was able to pull up at least two sources that really spoke to the topic well and for that I was very grateful.

The first article I came across was cleverly named, "Playwriting in the High-School Classroom." I was thrilled I had found an article of good length that actually spoke to the topic I was searching for. I started reading the article and realized that the dates they were mentioning seemed rather old, but I kept reading. I was about half way through when I looked at the publishing date. The article was published in May of 1938! I couldn't believe it, one of my main articles and it was completely outdated being written 75 years prior to today. I figured I was half way through so I figured I would finish the article. What I found was astonishing. Although the article was outdated so much of what it talked about rang true to today.

The author is Caroline Power was a high school teacher at University High School in Oakland, California. She speaks the truth about the art of playwriting. She talks about dialogue: "Dialogue never bothers a beginner. He never sees any reason to be worried about talk. And on the whole-- if his characters are real to him-- is alive" (Power 404). She goes back to one of our concepts we brought up in class, that writing should be fun. When we stop thinking and just start doing is when we produce our best work. She mentions the writing process in her article saying, "Product is less important than the process that goes on inside the writer" (Power 406). Even back in 1938 scholars were aware that writing should be about the process more than the product.

The other article was titled: "Writing Plays in the Composition Classroom." This article was not as old as my first but still slightly out of date being written about 30 years ago. Gilman Tracy the author states that "One of the problem inherent in any composition course is the students' lack of feel for an audience" (Tracy 65). This speaks true to today in our writing classrooms. Teachers want students to develop this sense of audience. of "who are they writing for." Tracy goes on to explain how playwriting can helps students develop these understands. 

So what I have found through these two sources so far is that playwriting, at one time or another, was important and being taught to some capacity. The decline seems to have happened around the time Ronald Reagan proposed his "A Nation at Risk." I would research this further to see if creative writing (as well as other forms of theatrical expression) in the classroom all started declining at the start of the Reagan era.