The Global Voices Program

How Global Voices Began

Global Voices was developed by Dr. Arlene Crewdson, founder of Pegasus Players, a well-established and respected nonprofit theater and arts organization in Chicago, and grew from two of the organization’s initiatives. The first was Pegasus’ highly successful Young Playwrights Festival (YPF), which began in 1984. The YPF is an innovative, school-oriented writing program that encourages the development of independent, high-level thinking and strong personal values, and enhances understanding of reading, writing, and cultural diversity. The Festival culminates in a professional presentation of four original one-act plays, chosen from hundreds submitted by students every year.

During the 2007-2008 school year, the Young Playwrights Festival reached over 5,000 students. 732 scripts have been submitted, written by over 800 student playwrights, several entries being written cooperatively in groups. Through the Festival, Pegasus has reached more than 103,000 teenagers and received and evaluated 10,532 original scripts. In 2007-2008 there were 131 YPF classroom tours and follow-up workshops teaching play writing in the Chicago schools requested by 84 teachers in 40 schools and alternative sites. All but five of the public schools had a majority of their students living in poverty. Eight free YPF matinee performances were held for school groups. Approximately 1,500 students attended free matinee performances of the Festival plays. In all schools and alternative sites that were visited, 90% had a majority of their students living in poverty. In the 2006-07 school year alone, approximately 800 students from 40 area schools submitted more than 700 plays. Since its inception, almost 100,000 students have submitted plays for the YPF. Pegasus was awarded a multi-year grant from the Kellogg Foundation to further develop, enhance, and expand the program.

The second initiative was an international theatrical touring program of Pegasus’ productions, sponsored by the federal government. These productions toured Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, Morocco, India, Senegal, Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, and Tunisia. Also, Pegasus has run teacher-training workshops in Lebanon and Uzbekistan.

Through these experiences, the idea for a new global program began to take shape – one that would have an international span, combining the methods of the Young Playwrights’ Festival with language instruction, which, like art, can transcend borders and cultures.

This became Global Voices.

In 2004, Global Voices received initial funding from the Chicago Public Schools and a local family foundation. In 2006, it received help from the U. S. State Department to expand Global Voices to include Muslim students in Jordan and Morocco.

Three Snapshots

Global Voices works well in a variety of settings and with a wide range of classes. The themes that emerge through the partnerships can vary greatly, reflecting the unique composition of each partnership. The essential components, though, are the partnering of classes in different countries and then the use of the performing arts as the vehicle to establish and further develop the partnership.

Internet tools, including setting up e-mail groups, are used to establish ongoing communications, for story development and editing, and video hookups and recordings are used to present the works. Each of the three examples below was distinctive.

One: A China Connection

In this case, the partners focused largely on improving language facility. An English class from Beijing No. 57 Junior and Senior High School was partnered with a Mandarin class at Chicago’s Northside College Prep School.

The Beijing school, an elite institution, was founded in 1957, and has an enrollment of more than 2,000 high-achieving students. Northside, with an enrollment of 1,000, is a selective admissions, advanced placement school. Since its founding in 1999, Northside students consistently outperform most every other school statewide on achievement tests.

It is late Spring and students in Dr. Haiyan Fu’s Northside Prep Mandarin class are rehearsing the plays they wrote in Mandarin as well as the play in English they just received from their partner class in Beijing. Because of the 13-hour time difference, the play would be taped for later viewing—allowing the Beijing class members to see their own work performed by native English speakers. And, the Beijing students can return the favor, performing the Mandarin works composed in Chicago.

Jane Hu, a bi-lingual Global Voices’ artist observes, making suggestions about staging. She encourages the students to speak up – for both the audience and for the video camera. The four students who wrote a play called, “Talking to Animals,” don their costumes, which consist of signs in Chinese identifying them as turtles, flamingos, giraffes, squirrels and cheetahs—and get in their animal positions, bragging to the zookeeper – in Mandarin—about their favored status at the zoo. The class giggles in appreciation.

Then a second play, “Guts”, is performed that ends quite graphically, with one actor simulating regurgitating his lunch on his classmate. Groans of disgust all around.

A third work, “What Goes Around Comes Around”, takes on the ramifications from cheating in class.

With summer vacation just around the corner, the students are completely absorbed in their work – confident that it is of a quality that can be performed readily by their Beijing peers.

Two: An ESL Collaboration

“Global Voices has really expanded our kids’ horizons – it’s terribly exciting and motivating. At the videoconference, at first the kids were reluctant to participate. But when the red light on the camera went on, they rushed to crowd around and get in their say. They found out how much they have in common with their Chicago partners, and how they’re different, too.” – Andrew Cooley, assistant head teacher and head of St. Albans’ English Department

Unlike the advanced placement Beijing and Northside students, students enrolled in English as a Second Language (ESL) classes are struggling with the basic task of learning the language well enough to participate successfully in other classes. For these participants the boost was as much in their self-confidence as in improving their language skills. For ESL students, the school experience begins in isolation from the mainstream. It was a revelation for the Chicago and Birmingham, England students each to see a class in the other country struggling with identical issues.

An ESL class in Chicago’s Kelly High School was partnered with an ESL class in St. Albans, a public school in Birmingham. Both schools are in working-class neighborhoods with large immigrant populations, and both classes reflect this with mixes of Latino and Asian students. For Chicago, Global Voices sent a bi-lingual artist (English/Spanish) into the classroom to teach the students the basics of playwriting and performing, while St. Albans teamed with the Birmingham Repertory Theatre for coaching.

As the students, teachers, artists, and administrators on both sides got to know each other, enthusiastic friendships developed and the Birmingham group invited two Chicago ESL students to visit Birmingham and work on their projects face-to-face, with a Birmingham civic organization paying travel expenses. The Global Voices grants paid the expenses for their classroom teacher to travel with them.

The visit happened in early May, 2007. Next year, the Chicago partners returned the favor to the Birmingham students.

In May 2009, the 25 ESL students from St. Albans School are gathered with the two student representatives from Kelly High School in Chicago to watch a rehearsal of their collaborative play, “Navy Pier,” in the small Door Theater of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre.

In this scene, Karla, a young woman who is mysteriously drawn to Chicago’s Navy Pier, is confronted by Diego, a ghost who lives there, searching for his young wife, who was killed in World War II. The scene comes to an end with silence in the theater.

Finally: “It’s not working,” says a young girl.” “Too much talking,” says another.

“You can’t tell what they are feeling,” says Antonio, one of the visitors from the U.S., also an immigrant from Mexico who came to Chicago when he was 15 years old, and is now a senior at Kelly.

“Let’s try it again,” says Carolyn Jester, head of the Rep’s schools program, who is directing the students. They quiet down, become actors once again and run through the edited scene. At the end, a murmur goes through the theater. “It works!” a student shouts. “We have a play!” Applause.

“This (Global Voices) has really helped me with my English – a lot. And working on the plays has helped me write better too.”—Antonio Isarve, Kelly High School

Three: Casablanca and Chicago

This collaboration was between an advanced French class at [Francis W.Parke School, an elite, highly selective private school in Chicago, and an English class in at Ben M’Sik, a public school in a poor neighborhood of Casablanca, Morocco.

For the Morocco-Chicago group, the subtext was, bluntly, to challenge negative stereotypes and build bridges for understanding between the participants in the Morocco school whose students are all Muslim, with the Chicago school, who were a mix of Christian and Jewish students.

Many of the Parker student had traveled a great deal but only none in the French class had been to Morocco. In addition to building linguistic competence, Parker's language programs promote cultural literacy. The French program includes the study of, among other things, literature, art, and music from the francophone world. Students were interested in connecting with students in Morocco to learn more about the culture through the Global Voices Project.

The Morocco students had good English skills, in addition to French fluency, as well as Arabic and Berber, but only limited contact with people outside of their country, and were intensely curious about their American partners.

Interestingly, the plays each group wrote had virtually identical themes: immigration, poverty, and terrorism. Of those topics, we will describe their reaction to the experience of terrorism, which had a direct impact on the program.

The final teleconference, scheduled for mid-May, on the Morocco side was to be held at the American consulate. However, as the date for the transmission neared, Casablanca was hit with five terrorist bombings, and the U.S. Consulate facilities were closed as a security measure. Ben M’Sik School had no computer access, so it appeared as if the terrorists had, in effect, shut down Global Voices in Morocco. Yet, the Morocco students were not dissuaded, even by bombs, and moved the project into their homes using private computer connections with Skype video to connect with each other and continue the program.

‘This has been an amazing experience…student) fears and hopes were almost identical on both sides.” Lorin Pritikin, French Instructor and Languages and Cultural Studies Department Chair, Grades 9-12, Francis W. Parker School

Building Community

Playwriting and performance are tools to communicate, both through the story being told and the collaboration between the writers, actors, and audience. From early Egyptian passion plays, on through Thespis’ tragedies, and the development of theater in all its forms, the purpose has been to bring people together to experience a shared vision, a moment of clarity.

The power of this art form is enduring and universal. Where Global Voices operates there is communication. We want it to be a catalyst for schools to develop more ways to help their students reach out to a larger world, and to learn to navigate successfully in a global environment.

Global Voices Leadership

Drs. Arlene Crewdson and Jack Connelly are responsible for Global Voices leadership. Crewdson conceptualized and devised the program, and manages its day-to-day operations. Connelly is working on structural design and marketing, all needed to expand the program to schools in the U.S. and around the world.

Crewdson founded Pegasus in 1978 and has directed numerous productions for the theater. She has taught classic theater on PBS station Channel 11 in Chicago and has published A Study to Classic Theater. She taught for twenty-five years as a professor in the Communications Department at Truman College. The Chicago Tribune has twice named Crewdson one of the 20 Chicagoans who annually are singled out for having made memorable contributions to the arts. Crewdson was awarded a Chicago Community Trust Fellowship ($70,000) for her work to provide access to the arts for disadvantaged people. She has also served as a mayoral appointee to the Community Development Block Grant Committee.

Crewdson was awarded a British American Arts Administrative Training Institute Fellowship, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, and was the official U.S. representative at Tashkent's First International Theater Festival in Uzbekistan, and has represented the Chicago Artists International Program in Egypt and Turkey, and addressed the United States Sister Cities International delegation in Casablanca Morocco, at the 50th Anniversary celebration of its founding.

Connelly has worked in academic, government, and nonprofit settings, taught students from elementary to graduate levels, trained teachers in rural Appalachia, served on a number of nonprofit, civic and government boards and commissions. He developed and ran Jobs for Youth/Chicago for 20 years, an organization that, under his direction, grew to help more than 13,000 young people from Chicago’s inner city to prepare for, find, keep and grow in good, private-sector jobs – the most successful organization of its kind in the country.

Under his leadership, the organization received The Chicago Community Trust's James Brown IV Award of Excellence for Outstanding Community Service, five separate State of Illinois Governor's Hometown Awards during the terms of three different Governors, Sara Lee Corporation's Chicago Spirit Award, and the President's Volunteer Service Award, presented by President George H. W. Bush in a White House ceremony, the nation’s highest civilian award for outstanding public service. Dr. Connelly was also president of the Board of Pegasus for six years. Both Pegasus and Jobs for Youth have received numerous commendations for excellence, including each being honored by The Chicago Community Trust for outstanding service to the community.