Inspire by the resources created and curated by BlackLivesMatteratSchool.com to help teachers engage students in action and work related to racial justice, what follows is an explication of a powerful interdisciplinary student project focused on race relations and police brutality, offered with the hope that it will empower some teachers to design projects related to these issues.

Chaos or Community, a student-written and -performed play, begins with all fifty performers wandering the stage, each verbalizing a character’s inner thoughts. Amidst the din, the audience cannot understand any individual voice. The noise is chaos.

With a harrowing scream, a narrator freezes the actors, bringing order to the drama. What follows are a dozen scenes that include verbatim re-enactments (for example, of parts of the Rodney King trial), historical imaginings (Antebellum plantation life), and contemporary real-life theatre (a Colin Kaepernick press conference).

After the actors’ final bows, the live audience remains seated to listen to and participate in a live discussion on race relations and police brutality with the students, members of the local police department, Black Lives Matter supporters, and other community leaders.

Amidst the backdrop of a violently splintered country in the fall of 2016, the students and their teachers had created a thing of beauty, a space for conversation and understanding, and reason for hope.

The Humanities Learning

Shared Texts

Current Events

In the fall of 2016, NFL star Colin Kaepernick began sitting during the National Anthem to raise awareness about racial injustice in the United States. Students watched Kaepernick’s press conferences and read Op-Eds and media accounts of the surrounding phenomenon. Kaepernick’s thoughtfulness and willingness to sacrifice his own interests for a greater good led students to make him a central character in their play.

Students also studied the recent shootings of unarmed black men, studying the circumstances and the personalities involved.

Local police offers visited class to share their perspectives, as did supports of the Black Lives Matter movement and white community allies. Students and guests conducted conversations while adhering to norms that encouraged all participants to feel uncomfortable but safe and challenged but welcome.

Chaos or Community

Students read excerpts from Martin Luther King Jr’s final book, from which they drew their play’s name. They grappled with his remarkably prescient arguments, including this:

Yet the average white person also has a responsibility. He has to resist the impulse to seize upon the rioter as the exclusive villain. He has to rise up with indignation against his own municipal, state and national governments to demand that the necessary reforms be instituted which alone will protect him. If he reserves his resentment only for the Negro, he will be the victim by allowing those who have the greatest culpability to evade responsibility.

Students learned that in this book, King had expanded the focus of his march for justice. King wrote:

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look at thousands of working people displaced from their jobs with reduced incomes as a result of automation while the profits of the employers remain intact, and say: “This is not just.”

Students grappled also with how King had sought to reconcile the division of “red” and “blue”:

Truth is found neither in traditional capitalism nor in classical Communism. Each represents a partial truth. Capitalism fails to see the truth in collectivism. Communism fails to see the truth in individualism. Capitalism fails to realize that life is social. Communism fails to realize that life is personal. The good and just society is neither the thesis of capitalism nor the antithesis of Communism, but a socially conscious democracy which reconciles the truths of individualism and collectivism.

And as they contemplated how to respond to current events, they discussed the brand of activism and secular faith King was contemplating:

A final victory is an accumulation of many short-term encounters. To lightly dismiss a success because it does not usher in a complete order of justice is to fail to comprehend the process of full victory. It underestimates the value of confrontation and dissolves the confidence born of partial victory by which new efforts are powered.

Antigone

Students explored the roots of Western drama by reading and discussing how Sophocles’ play dramatized the choice between chaos and community, as well as the conflicts that arise within families. They also became familiar with dramatic structures they would deploy in their own work, including the chorus, dialogue, and characterization.

Literary Circles

In addition to the shared texts, students selected a text to discuss with peers, from a list that included:

• Between the World & Me,Ta Nehisi Coates
• Blue Blood, Edward Conlin
• Always Running La Vida Loca, Rodriguez
• The Color Purple, Alice Walker
• Burro Genius, Victor Villasenor
• Autobiography of Malcolm X
• A People’s History of the United States

Selections were guided by the teachers, with an eye on student interests, independent reading levels, and positive peer groupings.

Production

In addition to a variety of process products, including journals, quick-writes, micro-essays, and reflections, students formed groups to produce a script for their scene.

Each scene required dialogue, stage directions, blocking guidance, and actor cues. Some scenes were original, while others took transcripts from judicial proceedings and media and historical events and brought them to life.

Scenes went through multiple rounds of feedback and revision on paper and through rehearsal, resulting in polished final products.

An Interdisciplinary Touch

This project integrated the traditionally separated subjects of literature, theatre, sociology, and media criticism. In addition, students studied the concept of waves and the practical applications of sound and light in order to create soundscapes for the performance.

Throughout the performance, these backgrounds added texture and resonance to the acting and lines. You can see the student-created backdrop on the left side of this photo:

Choosing The Product

Angie and her teaching partner decided in August, before school began, that their project’s final product would be a play. They arranged to use a local theatre’s space for rehearsals and for the performances, and finalized the dates well in advance. They also built a small stage and placed it in the middle of the classroom so it would be the first thing students saw upon entry. Students performed on that stage at the end of the first week, immediately raising the anticipation, excitement, and, productive nervousness for the eventual public performance.

Some PBL teachers decide not to choose a final product in advance, instead allowing students to choose, often with the admirable goal of prioritizing student voice and choice. Other teachers might argue that “the student is the product,” and thereby emphasize the journey instead of the endpoint.

In the case of Chaos or Community, the teacher’s willingness to choose the product up front allowed the students to create a play that featured crisp and believable acting, expert lightning and sound, beautiful costumes, and a refined and compelling script. The product’s high quality in turn led to a post-performance conversation completely free of condescension, where adults welcomed teenagers’ ideas into the conversation about how to pursue justice and heal communities.

The Chaos and Community students had put into the world something to be admired, and in so doing had shown themselves capable of creating valuable moments of clarity about racial justice, and adults took notice.

Three more notes about products, as they relate to Chaos and Community:

• The students built a shared sense of quality through exemplar analysis. Analyzing scripts, costumes, dramatic techniques (exemplar analysis) became a core literacy-building element of the project. Students built skills by discussing, reading, and writing about what constitutes quality and determining how they might emulate those elements of quality in their own work.
• Choosing a product does not foreclose on student voice and choice. In this case, students chose which historical scenes to re-enact, they decided to include a Greek chorus to comment on the action, they influenced the organization of the post-production town-hall. Additionally, those students most interested in acting sought lead roles, while others played minor parts and focused instead on lightning and sound.
• Nearly every teenager in the US loves dramatic performance. They seek it out on Netflix, Youtube, reality shows, and TikTok. Choosing a product that resonates with what students do with their free time does honor their interests.

A few more resources:

Mapping your role in pursuit of racial justice.

Direction action within a school context: Ron Berger’s Deeper Learning Keynote

Jeff Robin describing the difference between project-based and project-oriented learning

A design heuristic from a previous post about work quality: