By Chelsea Street, Education Marketing Manager, Alliance Theatre
What if educators could stream critically acclaimed theater productions for students and receive arts integration training and resources for free? Thanks to an exciting new partnership between the Alliance Theatre and Cox Campus, these “what-ifs” are becoming a reality.
Cox Campus is an innovative learning platform that scales the transformative work of the Rollins Center for Language and Literacy and extends its reach beyond Atlanta to communities around the world. Alliance Theatre Arts Integration on Cox Campus brings the stage into every classroom and makes arts integration possible for every teacher.
This partnership provides classrooms worldwide with free educational access to the Alliance Theatre’s critically acclaimed Theatre for Youth and Families productions via the Cox Campus platform. Students can now experience Doctor De Soto come to life from the page to the stage when they stream the Alliance Theatre’s world-premiere production.
Teachers have access to training and instructional resources designed to equip them in effective, evidence-based arts-integrated theater strategies. Accompanying instructional videos model basic arts-integration strategies that teachers can implement as pre- or post-activities to extend learning across content areas. This training seeks to make arts-integration accessible for all educators.
“Research has proven the benefits of the Alliance Theatre’s arts integration programs, with students demonstrating gains in writing quality and comprehension, improvement in vocabulary, and increased oral language skills. Our partnership with Cox Campus allows us to provide these benefits to students and teachers across the country and beyond,” says Head of Elementary School Programs, Rebecca Pogue Fields.
In its first three months, more than 740 teachers engaged with the course. The impact has extended to educators across 36 Georgia counties, 39 states, and 5 countries, and teachers are excited to share about their experiences:
“This is the best, most interesting online course I have taken.”
“I would love to see continuity of this course to continue to bring theater to the classroom.”
Today, more than 400,000 members across all fifty states and over 135 countries engage with Cox Campus, a platform offering 100% free, unlimited access to a broad and deep range of courses, resources, webinars, and community discussions—all advancing language and literacy practices. The Alliance Theatre is honored to partner with this inspiring platform to leverage theater-based strategies that elevate student voice and foster deeper, more creative engagement with the artistic material.
“When we built the Goizueta Stage for Youth & Families, we dreamed of removing barriers to participation for our entire community,” says Jennings Hertz Artistic Director Christopher Moses. “We define that term [community] broadly and never wanted zip code to be the determining factor in who can access our work. Partnering with the world-renowned Cox Campus allowed us to immediately reach classrooms not only throughout the entire state of Georgia, but across the globe.”
Teachers can eagerly anticipate additional Alliance Theatre productions and courses to stream coming this Fall. Here’s to arts integration in every classroom!
Learn4Life is thrilled to see the partnership between our Bright Spot, Cox Campus, and the Alliance Theatre. This partnership is a shining example of how organizations can infuse the science of reading into their work while staying true to their programming. We are excited to see how this partnership continues to expand access to arts-integrated literacy resources for classrooms, teachers, and families.
If you’re a parent, or from a school, nonprofit, community organization, or business, and you’d like to be part of more literacy conversations, please join our early literacy network here. All are welcome, and we’d love to have your voice at the table.
This is sponsored content.
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