COLLEGE PARK, MD (March, 2016) Doctoral student Anika Prather is a one-of-a-kind teacher the kind who writes a play with her students. Now their co-written play, The Table, is coming to campus as part of the Maryland Dialogues on Diversity and Community.
For ten years, Anika taught high school English and theater at the private Christian school her parents founded. While there, she designed a literature program in imitation of the one she encountered while in graduate school at St. John’s College, in which students study classics – so-called “great books.” Anika engaged her students in Socratic dialogues and had them write, speak, and create art to reveal the connections they were making to the texts.
Teaching this program led Anika to think deeply about the cultural relevance of these books for her African American students. And eventually, after the school closed and her students went off to college at Bowie State University, Hampton University, and the University of Maryland, she reunited with them to co-write a play called The Table.
Anika is pursuing a Ph.D. in English, Theater, and Literacy Education, and The Table is closely tied to her dissertation research, a phenomenological study on some of those former students’ lived experiences in that literature classroom. The play is a dramatic demonstration of what those experiences were like.
“It’s about how classic texts are not culturally irrelevant to African American students,” Anika explains. “It's really in how we teach them and invite students to experience them. The play reveals why African Americans can see themselves in these texts: it's because they tell the human story. No matter what race we are, what we have in common is the human journey.”
While Anika acknowledges that there is some controversy around calling any books “classic” or “great,” arising from the historical exclusion of minorities from the literary canon, she points out that the books featured in The Table have played a significant role in African Americans finding their place in the country that once enslaved them. In her dissertation, she expounds on historical accounts of notable African Americans – among them Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, Nannie Helen Burroughs, W.E.B. DuBois, James Baldwin, and Huey P. Newton – using these texts to further the cause of freedom and equality. A touchstone example is the famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail” penned by Martin Luther King, Jr., who invoked St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas to argue for the necessity of civil disobedience in the face of unjust laws.
In addition to her master’s from St. John’s, Anika holds another in educational theater from New York University, and drama has always had a standout role in her teaching career. So it was only natural that she should ask her former students – now participants in a doctoral study – to use drama to unveil their classroom experiences. But she says that as she met with them, the play emerged organically, not by design but by collaboration.
“All the actors are my former students, and I’ll be both directing and performing,” Anika says. “This has been a very long journey.”
The Table: Where African American Students Meet the Great Books will take the stage of Ulrich Recital Hall in Tawes on Wednesday, April 13, at 7:00 p.m. The performance is sponsored by the College of Education, the Department of English, the Department of Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership (TLPL), and the TLPL Graduate Student Association. Admission is free.
The Maryland Dialogues on Diversity and Community are a series of events, lectures, symposia, discussions, and listening sessions for faculty, staff, students, and alumni to help advance discussions of identity, difference, and commonality. An ongoing initiative that will highlight one aspect of the intersecting quality of diversity at a time, in their first year the Maryland Dialogues are emphasizing issues of race and racism, not in isolation but in relation to issues of gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, language, religion, and disability, each of which will be the subject of future focus.
Click here to learn more about the Maryland Dialogues.
Anika T. Prather is a Ph.D. student in the Curriculum and Instruction program, concentrating in English, Theater, and Literacy Education. She holds a bachelor’s in elementary education and a master’s in music education from Howard University, a master’s in liberal arts from St. John’s College, and a master’s in educational theater from New York University. She is the founder of The Living Water School, a Christian school for independent learners in southern Maryland.
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