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Welcome to Amplify & Ignite 2025

Thank you to our generous Donors -
Emerson College:
  • Academic Affairs
  • School of the Arts
  • Social Justice Collaborative
  • Department of Performing Arts 
  • Graduate Studies
  • Elma Lewis Center
  • Theatre Education Graduate Association
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Create your personalized schedule or click HERE to be directed back to the 2025 homepage.

If you wish to purchase a ticket to our Saturday Evening Events (Limited Tickets Available!): CLICK HERE

Sustainability Invitation
Emerson Sustainability is currently preparing for the annual Campus Race to Zero Waste competition that runs from February through the end of March. It’s a friendly competition between universities in North America to reduce waste on campuses and raise awareness about waste-related behaviors. In celebration of Campus Race to Zero Waste, we are participating in the Green Event Certification program and we hope you will join us in this challenge. In advance of your travel to Boston, we encourage you to bring a reusable water bottle and/or hot thermos and utensils to reduce the need for single use products.
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Voices for Empathetic Change: Two Boston Community Organizations' Approaches to Social Justice Empowerment for Youth
Friday March 21, 2025 1:00pm - 2:15pm EDT
Black Box
Session Evaluation
IMPROVing Medicine: A case study on Afro-Latin youth-led, theatre interventions for medical students
Presenter: Josephine Ross
The positive impact of using improvisational theatre (improv) to improve social skills among medical professionals has been demonstrated consistently. However, no study has been conducted that investigates the effects of including marginalized youth as facilitators in leading improv exercises with medical students. In September 2024, a workshop was developed for medical students to directly engage with youth of color and to understand the lived experiences of the teens. In this initiative, six Afro-Latin youth were selected to work with Josephine Ross at Hyde Square Task Force (HSTF). The youth collaborated on the design and facilitation of an improv-based workshop for medical students. Data suggests that the empathy levels of these medical students increased through participation in improv exercises and direct involvement with the youth. Substantial change also occurred in the youth facilitators. Specifically, these areas of growth included their perceptions of themselves as leaders and artists. More importantly, this case study has implications for future DEI-focused work. By bringing two groups of people who do not typically engage with one another together, the teens and medical students learned about and developed understanding for each other. Knowing of its effects on social skill acquisition, improv became the foundation from which empathy grew. In this workshop, we will discuss the procedures and findings of the collaboration between HSTF and Tufts University School of Medicine. Following this brief presentation, participants will experience an hour-long improv intervention led by two of the Afro-Latin youth facilitators. Seeing how the improv games and scenarios focus on the lives of marginalized youth, participants will experience how this workshop design allows for medical students to have a deeper understanding of the lived experiences of teens of color. We will end the session with a discussion about future work and how these findings could impact future DEI designs.

Change Makers: Empowering Students as Leaders of their own Education & Activism
Presenters: Raquel Duarte Hunt and Mark VanDerzee

In this session, presenters will share the "Change Makers" framework, a flexible developmental framework that utilizes theatre as a powerful tool for developing students into change makers. Participants will learn about Company One Theatre (C1), a Boston-based theatre company whose mission is to build community at the intersection of art and social change; and its education work focusing on the evolution of the Change Maker framework as a curricular tool and the North Star for all its education programming. Participants will engage with the five skills of the framework: Empathy, Build Community, Critical Consciousness, Agency, and Social Justice through hands-on activities and embodiment through play. Participants will be invited to reflect on what is essential when activating their students to social action and envision how they (as educators) might empower them (their students) to that action by considering the classes they teach, the content they chose, the scaffolding they build, and how their students are positioned as leaders of their own education and activism.
Speakers
JR

Josephine Ross

Josephine F. Ross is an artist and educator based out of Boston. Originally from Minneapolis, Josephine Ross (M.Ed.) has worked throughout the country as an actor, director, and educator at some of the most influential arts organizations and theaters in the nation (e.g. the Guthrie... Read More →
RD

Raquel Duarte Hunt

Raquel Duarte Hunt l is the Education Program Manager at Company One Theatre. Raqael is excited to be back in the arts education sector after many years homeschooling her children in the Colombian mountaintops of her Taino ancestral cousins. Working with Company One is a homecoming... Read More →
MV

Mark VanDerzee

Mark VanDerzee is a co-founder and Education Director of Company One Theatre (C1). Mark is also a teacher of Improvisation and Social Justice Theater at Brookline High School, where he won the Caverly Award for Educator of the Year in 2019. Since 1999, Mark has led the development... Read More →
Friday March 21, 2025 1:00pm - 2:15pm EDT
Black Box
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