Research Introduction

My research project is an examination of inclusive casting processes in high school theatre environments. The goal of my project is to gain an insight that hasn't before been examined on whether casting practices or lack thereof could help of hurt students, and whether a program's racial demographic is influenced by these casting practices. I will be focusing my research on public high schools in the Denver Metro Area, and defining diversity as the statistic of students who fall into a racial minority group. I will be observing as many schools as possible, and will collect my data through reaching out to the directors about whether I could come watch a rehearsal, sending them my project overview, and then going to observe a rehearsal. I will request from the directors a cast list with the ethnicities of each student(this is gathered from an online portal so it is equal across schools and the directors will not be asked to guess at their students' races). From there, I will be sending out questionnaires to select students and the program directors, and gather my qualitative data there. With the data from the cast lists, I'll be formulating what I'm calling a "diversity proportion" for the purposes of my study. This will be the composite of the school's minority statistic over the one I've found for the cast. Once I have these statistics, I will be comparing them across schools and districts, using the qualitative data I've gathered to back up my conclusions. The ultimate goal of my study is to examine ways high schools are successfully fostering inclusion within their theatre programs and methods that don't work, and gain a better understanding of how to successfully foster inclusion in high school theatre settings.