Contact
Email: [email protected]
Educational Philosophy
Education found me. I should be clear about that from the start. I didn’t grow up with the idea of assuming head of a classroom status. As my professional life progressed through my twenties I found myself turning down jobs and opportunities, even acting gigs, because it might interfere with the after school theater program I wasn’t even really being paid to guide.
It hit me most abruptly, this idea that I might have become an educator without having meant to. I was doing much of the job. I was teaching methodology to my students. I was administering discipline in an increasingly measured and calculated way. My directing style slowly grew towards allowing the actors and technicians to make their own choices in terms of the play, and increasingly saw my role, not as a “directator”, but as an aware guide. Indeed, I was cresting towards constructivism before ever learning what constructivism was.
I first attended Emerson College as a graduate student at 30 and immediately realized how much more prepared I felt than I would have fresh out of undergrad. I had made many of my mistakes in that afterschool program, and had honed many skills without realizing they were being sharpened. My pedagogy, then, has not been constrained by ideas of ‘the way it ought to be’. Instead, I find myself confident in a methodology which involves collaborating with students in an active environment while also ensuring that I am the one with the final authority. Behavior can be redirected and refocused in a way which does not alienate. The student who has trouble doing work can often be found to have an easier understanding of the material by accessing another of the theorized Multiple Intelligences.
This is not to suggest that prevailing pedagogy is not a tool in the box. In-class testing and quizzing are one of a plethora of ways to accurately gauge a student’s progress. Lecturing is sometimes the best way to dispense a certain parcel of information. Detention or parental intervention can certainly be used to discipline the student for whom gentle redirection does not register. Even standardized testing, that lightning rod of a topic which is prevalent in any modern educational discussion, is another way in which to attempt as near an objective comparison, as possible, of an inherently subjective set of data.
Yet students, for whatever those tests may determine, are not standard. They are individual and they are artistic and they are talented. It is my belief that a theater program can provide a valuable, even vital, space for those students to discover the ways in which they learn. It is my intention, as an educator, to provide that space. To provide the light which they can then learn to turn on themselves in order to see who they are.
A math class teaches you, importantly, how to add. An English class teaches you how to analyze. A history class teaches you how to understand the past. A science class teaches you how to break things down and build them back up.
And, it is my belief, a theater class can teach you how to be.
Bio
John Lincoln has worked as a director, actor, fight choreographer, and educator for over a decade. He holds BAs in Theatre Performance and Film Studies from Rhode Island College and an MA in Theatre Education from Emerson College. He served as the Chapter Director for the Educational Theatre Association of Rhode Island for three years, a post which saw him bringing together over two hundred students, educators, and professionals for the annual Rhode Island Theater Conference. For seven years he served on the boards of both the Rhode Island Theatre Education Association and the New England Drama council, the organizations responsible for running the Rhode Island Drama Festival and the New England Drama Festival, respectively. He directed over a dozen shows for Cumberland High School where, in 2011, his play Tonight We Begin Again was selected to represent Rhode Island at the International Thespian Festival and, in 2013, his play Apartment 259 was selected to represent Rhode Island at the New England Drama Festival. He currently works for Deer Isle - Stonington Schools where he is the Director of the REACH Performing Arts Center. He directed the high school to the regional championship at the Maine Drama Festival in 2015 with Dogg's Hamlet, and he directed War of the Worlds - The 1938 Radio Script in 2016 when it was chosen as the Maine Chapter Select for the International Thespian Festival. John currently lives on Deer Isle, Maine with his wife and three young children.
Email: [email protected]
Educational Philosophy
Education found me. I should be clear about that from the start. I didn’t grow up with the idea of assuming head of a classroom status. As my professional life progressed through my twenties I found myself turning down jobs and opportunities, even acting gigs, because it might interfere with the after school theater program I wasn’t even really being paid to guide.
It hit me most abruptly, this idea that I might have become an educator without having meant to. I was doing much of the job. I was teaching methodology to my students. I was administering discipline in an increasingly measured and calculated way. My directing style slowly grew towards allowing the actors and technicians to make their own choices in terms of the play, and increasingly saw my role, not as a “directator”, but as an aware guide. Indeed, I was cresting towards constructivism before ever learning what constructivism was.
I first attended Emerson College as a graduate student at 30 and immediately realized how much more prepared I felt than I would have fresh out of undergrad. I had made many of my mistakes in that afterschool program, and had honed many skills without realizing they were being sharpened. My pedagogy, then, has not been constrained by ideas of ‘the way it ought to be’. Instead, I find myself confident in a methodology which involves collaborating with students in an active environment while also ensuring that I am the one with the final authority. Behavior can be redirected and refocused in a way which does not alienate. The student who has trouble doing work can often be found to have an easier understanding of the material by accessing another of the theorized Multiple Intelligences.
This is not to suggest that prevailing pedagogy is not a tool in the box. In-class testing and quizzing are one of a plethora of ways to accurately gauge a student’s progress. Lecturing is sometimes the best way to dispense a certain parcel of information. Detention or parental intervention can certainly be used to discipline the student for whom gentle redirection does not register. Even standardized testing, that lightning rod of a topic which is prevalent in any modern educational discussion, is another way in which to attempt as near an objective comparison, as possible, of an inherently subjective set of data.
Yet students, for whatever those tests may determine, are not standard. They are individual and they are artistic and they are talented. It is my belief that a theater program can provide a valuable, even vital, space for those students to discover the ways in which they learn. It is my intention, as an educator, to provide that space. To provide the light which they can then learn to turn on themselves in order to see who they are.
A math class teaches you, importantly, how to add. An English class teaches you how to analyze. A history class teaches you how to understand the past. A science class teaches you how to break things down and build them back up.
And, it is my belief, a theater class can teach you how to be.
Bio
John Lincoln has worked as a director, actor, fight choreographer, and educator for over a decade. He holds BAs in Theatre Performance and Film Studies from Rhode Island College and an MA in Theatre Education from Emerson College. He served as the Chapter Director for the Educational Theatre Association of Rhode Island for three years, a post which saw him bringing together over two hundred students, educators, and professionals for the annual Rhode Island Theater Conference. For seven years he served on the boards of both the Rhode Island Theatre Education Association and the New England Drama council, the organizations responsible for running the Rhode Island Drama Festival and the New England Drama Festival, respectively. He directed over a dozen shows for Cumberland High School where, in 2011, his play Tonight We Begin Again was selected to represent Rhode Island at the International Thespian Festival and, in 2013, his play Apartment 259 was selected to represent Rhode Island at the New England Drama Festival. He currently works for Deer Isle - Stonington Schools where he is the Director of the REACH Performing Arts Center. He directed the high school to the regional championship at the Maine Drama Festival in 2015 with Dogg's Hamlet, and he directed War of the Worlds - The 1938 Radio Script in 2016 when it was chosen as the Maine Chapter Select for the International Thespian Festival. John currently lives on Deer Isle, Maine with his wife and three young children.