American Voices

NYC Department of Theater

American Voices (AV) is a cross-curricular program providing clear and dynamic instructional units of study and resources for History, Theater and/or English teacher colleagues to stimulate and support student learning about 20th Century American socio-cultural history through a theatrical lens.

AV Program Goals

Produce an expansive approach to teaching American History and Theater that engages students in the contextual world of a diverse given era.
Develop and disseminate dynamic units of study to engage students in a lively exploration of the cultural impact on history. AV units illuminate historical decades (1920s - 1990s) in conjunction with great American plays as windows and mirrors, artifacts and lenses on America's socio-cultural heritage.
Provide NYC middle and high school students with opportunities to learn about the social and cultural context of American history as well as how theatrical story and great plays often reveal crucial contexts that provide a more nuanced picture of events.
Provide history and Theater/English teachers (at the same school) with professional learning and opportunities to expand their own pedagogy through co-planning and co-teaching and thus engage students, appreciating their subject matters in a broader context.
Share FREE significant resources of American Voices Kits containing vetted lesson plans and assessments to teach the plays and historical context. Kits include:
1. Fully realized lesson plans for theater and history
2. PowerPoints of primary and secondary resources
3. Full scripts of select plays
4. Contemporary music and/or musical theater tracks relevant to the period

These units intentionally focus with an inclusive eye on select socio-cultural aspects of each decade but do not attempt to teach the breadth of a period’s history.

"It often happens that only from the words of a good story-teller do we realize what we have done and what we have missed, and what we should have done and what we shouldn't have. It is perhaps in these stories, oral and written, that the true history of mankind can be found and that through them one can perhaps sense if not fully know the meaning of that history."

-Ivo Andric, Yugoslavia, Nobel Prize in Literature speech , NY Times, May 1962