Obviously classroom teachers, we're always focused on getting authentic work from our students. And AI is up ending that. And it's really difficult sometimes to get through that. And kids. Let's face it, I mean, sometimes kids are going to take the easy way out and AI take some of the work away from students unfortunately, and that academic integrity, the disciplines of communication in theater education are facing new challenges in the post COVID world. Everything ranging from remote learning to the introduction of AI technology, to stress to school budgets are having an impact in the classroom. This is random acts of knowledge presented by Heartland Community College.
I'm your host, Steve fast. Today we are talking with the Vice President of the Illinois Communication and Theater Association about the challenges High School speech, Communication and Theater teachers face and how her organization is working to help teachers prepare their students for the future.
My name is Heather Danek. I am a Speech and Drama teacher at Minooka Community High School in Minooka, Illinois. And I'm this year's Illinois Communication and Theater Association's first vice president and convention planning chair. And our annual convention this year will be held at Heartland college tember 14th through the 16th will tell us a little bit about this organization, the Illinois Communication and Theater Association, what do you do? What is your mission, the Illinois Communication and Theater Association has been in existence for coming up on almost 100 years. So we're at 93 years right now. And we are an organization of roughly 200 high school and college teachers throughout the state beyond we and our primary focus is on the teaching of communication and theatre skills. in all areas and all levels. We have our members who are junior high teachers, we have many high school teachers, we have a lot of college professors, PhD professors, and some graduate students just at the start of their career as well. It's Communication and Theater.
Can you tell me how those disciplines can be different? How are they tied together? And how does it bring itself out in the teaching that your members do?
Yeah, that's a great question. So Communication and Theater really are related in the fact that they're both part of the human experience. You know, we have to communicate every single day we have to communicate, to work with others to understand and be understood. And theater is much the same way. So we are storytellers, we are working collaboratively. So we get kind of those correlating connections between speech and theater. And also, I mean, just practically speaking, a lot of our forensics coaches are also theater people, or theater nerds, as we sometimes call each other. But we're we're people who are in the performance realm, whether that's oratorical performance, or whether that's a theatrical performance, how did you become involved with this organization?
And what led you to devote part of your life to these things?
Well, I could go in the Wayback Machine and tell you that when I was a kid, I mean, all I ever wanted to be was a teacher. And I love to read and I love to write, and I definitely love to act. And so I thought being an English teacher was my path. And I grew up that and got my degree in English, and got my first job teaching English and I thought, this is awful. Like, I really am not enjoying this. This is like really no fun at all. That's not true. It really was. It had its days, but it was junior high English. So you know, in first year teaching more bad days than good that first year. But I spent my morning that first year teaching with seniors in high school, teaching them public speaking, the public speaking required public speaking classes for graduation. And I just love that. And I was a speech performer in high school in Iowa. So I was really grateful that my first teaching experience also gave me the opportunity to teach seniors and also to teach public speaking my first experience, too, I teaching experience, I directed the theater programs, and I did this speech coaching both large group and individual events in Iowa. So then when I moved to Illinois and got the job at Minooka, they needed they were just bringing back their speech program and needed a speech teacher. And I happened to arrive at the perfect time. And so that brought me you know, to where I've kind of become a speech teacher pretty much exclusively at Minooka. And we have a total of five speech teachers here at my school. So we've done really well to build up our program over the years. And as far as the organization goes, when I was in Iowa, I was a member of the Iowa high school speech Association, which would be kind of akin to our HSA only that is the governing body for speech activities only and they
have an annual convention. And I attended that my first year teaching and thought this is really valuable for me, especially as a first year teacher. So when I moved to Illinois after that first year, I got a little flyer in my mailbox that said, ICTA, come join us. And I did. And that was 25 years ago.
So through that time, you've probably experienced having a lot of students. And I wonder, quite often theater programs, extracurriculars often become victims to you know, budget cuts, especially at the high school level, there is obviously a case to say a lot is lost by that. And I think school boards and administrators say, well, we want to stick to the core curriculum, put more effort into that. But what do non speech and non theater oriented students get out of having exposure to those sorts of programs, maybe it's something that interests them, but maybe they don't think of it as something they'll go on to do in college or beyond. But there is probably more that it offers for students that are trying to do all sorts of things.
I think that and this is something I tell my own students, and I teach freshmen in a drama class. And then I have dual credit, all the way up through dual credit, Speech Communication, learning to communicate well as a life skill. So regardless, if you're going to be in front of an audience every day, or even making public speeches every day, as you move from secondary education into higher ed into your profession, you're communicating every day. So we can all get better at that. As for the...
I think students learn a lot of self confidence, they learn they get some self awareness from taking a communications class, I think they learn I see this a lot with my honors level students, one of the first things that we do is we'll have a kind of sit around in a big circle, and they give them seven questions that they have to determine if they have to determine if those statements are true or false. And they're kind of common misconceptions about communication, like the role of a sender and receiver, you know that it and so I think there's an awareness that happens for students, when they realize like, look, even when I am just sitting silently at my desk, I'm actually still sending a message. And even though my teacher is the one standing in front of the room, she's still receiving messages from me all the time, even though she's the one doing the primary sending. So you have this transactional nature of communication, you have cyclical nature, you have the irreversible nature. So I think there's a student's get a real awareness of all the different facets of communication and how it impacts their lives, their relationships, their relationship with themselves, with their co workers, their families. And that's not just something that's part of your educational experience. But that's really something that you carry through everywhere throughout your life.
So at the conference itself, what are some of the things that this group will get together and do and have opportunities to learn about?
We have around 30 sessions that we're offering over the two main days of the convention. So there are several sessions focusing on pedagogy, which would be things like, you know, the teaching and learning of primarily our discipline, speech and theater, we also have a session, the HSA recently determined, I believe, in June, that they were going to be dropping competitive debate as a sanctioned event, through with a state series and competitions that the state would put on. So that was obviously disappointing for many of our members. So we're going to be talking about what we can do for those kids who want to debate who want to learn that skill and who are very good at it. And we have some schools in our state, who have very successful debate programs to the fact that they no longer have that state series. You can't have a student from your school crowned debate champion anymore. That's, that's quite disappointing. So we'll be talking about some of those current trends like the HSA, for example, the debate and the HSA decision. We'll also be talking about dual credit and the AI requirements. Those are a couple of big hot button issues that speech teachers and coaches and particularly like dual credit folks like myself, care about, like we have to follow these articulation initiatives. And we're also faculty members at our own campuses, high schools and the like. So kind of walking that bridge and what it takes to walk those two lines. We'll do some performance panels. So we have a couple of things that community players theatre of Bloomington Normal is coming. And they're going to be doing a performance with us. And then they're also going to be sharing a session on connecting community theater and the school theater. We have some other initiative geared sessions like advocacy for ICTA. Over the past several years, we've been working on getting speech communication as part of the school code, which we were able to do so we continue to work on that and raising awareness about that and helping teachers in play
Throughout the state where they don't have a public communications class that their kids can take, and how they can utilize that change in the school code now to bring communication education back into their schools, and then we also have our long range planning. So looking at kind of like the growth in the life of ICTA, moving forward into the future. So there are just a lot of things we have some fun events planned to. So we're going to do a tour at the steel brewery, we're going to on Friday night, we have trivia night, we love to give out awards. And of course, we're speech teachers. So we love to give speeches, a presentation, and then speeches of acceptance for the awards we've just presented. So those are always great. We have some wonderful award winners very deserving this year. So we've got some receptions, fun games, food, general merriment, and a lot of getting together with old friends making new friends. It's really one of it's like, it's my favorite weekend of the year, it's so much fun.
When you were talking about some of the things there'd be workshops or seminars on in the conference, you mentioned dual credit. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the benefit of dual credit, how, first of all, how it works, maybe your school, and what the benefit has been for your students in that discipline.
So dual credit is where students will take a class at (usually), a lot of times it's at a high school, and it's taught oftentimes by high school faculty who have a master's in content. And so the students will take that course. And then after successful completion of that course, which equates to a C or higher as a final grade, they get dual credit, so they get high school credit, and also college credit. So at Minooka, we have a lot of dual credit classes. In all of our we have business and technology classes that are dual credit, we have history, English, speech, art classes, all kinds of things that the kids can earn dual credit. So it's really a huge money saver for kids, especially when they get to that junior senior year of high school is really where they have a lot of those opportunities opening up for them. So now in some cases, in some schools, they don't have qualified teachers, and that they don't have teachers with master's in content. So in that case, they would have their their junior college would send professors to them, or in some cases, kids, actually, the high school kids actually go to the junior campus Junior College campus to take those classes. So depending on what model and the availability and how close your your college campuses to your high school kind of affects the amount of offerings that a school can provide for students. Obviously, the benefits are that students are earning college credit while they're still in high school. It's a humongous savings. My own children, I have two boys, one who's graduated from high school, and one who will graduate this year as a senior and both of them earned more than 20 credit hours in their junior and senior year. And so as we were going through planning, for example, my oldest boy planning his four year plan with his four year university, which is out of state, I mean, they just started marking off what kinds of classes he didn't have to take, because he had that dual credit. So huge savings for the families. And that's one reason that the state I think is and the local school districts are really putting a lot of preference to offering those dual credit classes and really working on encouraging kids to take those dual credit classes. Because it's helping kids get through college in four years. It's helping them get ready for college in that the classes have more rigor than a high school class, it's kind of setting them up for those college expectations, and providing a bridge between high school and college.
I know that sometimes students have to consider that they could take an advanced placement course in a certain area, or or Yeah, or they could take dual credit. Is that the case ever with communications in your experience?
So there isn't an AP course for communication. So if a student wanted to earn college credit and comm pretty much what's offered in most places is the comm 101 class. We call it in communication parlance. We call it the front porch course. It's like the course everybody takes regardless of your discipline. You're a science major, you're a bio major, you're a history major. Everybody you go to a four year university, you're going to take Comoro one, somewhere along the line, they may change the number of it, but essentially the course requirements remain. So the common one offering at many of the high schools certainly checks that box for a lot of kids now, AP, for example, at Minooka. We have AP Language and composition and we have AP Literature. We also have English 101 and English 102. So we do have students who are making those choices like choosing the AP track or choosing the dual credit track.
Well, so one of the things I want to talk to you about a little bit is as you meet with your colleagues and others at this conference and in the organization, so much has changed about how we teach and even it's changed about performance in the last couple of years, because with the pandemic, everybody went online, they did interviews like the way they can't see this, but the way we're recording this one, you know, on Zoom, and it's really changed a lot of the way that instruction can be given and received, but also about how we kind of communicate. And even with the emergence of digital technology, how a lot of people perform in exercise, sort of that the skills of theater, have you been encountering this with your group? Have you dealt with how technology might be changing some of these things that, that we all do now and how it happens in the classroom and beyond?
Definitely. So for example, we have a couple of sessions that we're talking about at this conference. One is on chat, GPT and AI, obviously, classroom teachers are always focused on getting authentic work from our students. And AI is up ending that. And it's really difficult sometimes to get through that. And kids, let's face it, I mean, sometimes kids are going to take the easy way out and AI take some of the work away from students, unfortunately, and that academic integrity. So I think technology has changed the teaching profession, for better or worse. So you have things like chat, GPT, and AI, which can cause the struggles of the authentic work, then I use a program in my class. And here at Monica, many of our speech teachers use this program called pops the power of public speaking. And I know a lot of other schools in the state are using that as well. And that uses AI where students can actually record their speeches online, they're those recordings are analyzed then, and the students get feedback, which is oftentimes generated by AI. So I mean, it's looking for like word patterns, word recognition, the words per minute how fast you speak. It also pays attention to things like your body movement, and it analyzes what parts of your body move the most when you present those types of things. So I think there's an example of where technology works to benefit in this discipline. And a one of my colleagues, she teaches across the hall from me here. And she actually even though we're back in person, full days, rooms full of students, she actually still has students join a Google meet every class period. So that she is she's like interacting with students in person in the room, but then also on Google meet. And she uses that as a way to just kind of manage her class answer questions streamline the process of helping students kind of get checks and reviews of their work and their outlines. And as they're going through the speech prep process. So I mean, I think there's a lot of ways that teachers creatively are using technology. But then of course, we recognize that it has changed. And I think one change that's happened to is just kind of the, I don't want to say that the attitudes of our students, they become more digitally dependent than they were before. So they're a little less likely to want to get up in front, because they've been able to have that screen, but able to turn their camera off if they wanted to. And now that we're in person, you can't turn that part off. So there's there's ups and downs, and it's going to, it's going to be a continuing balancing act between the good and bad of technology.
It's interesting that you say that, because I think one of the biggest barriers for some people in giving a speech or getting on stage is the fact that they are looking out at that audience. And it's very different when you do it in person in a room with people than when you do it through a computer screen. I think it's interesting to see also how, as you said earlier, that can build confidence, but I think it's an experience that might be lessened in today's school experience.
And I think that kids still need that face to face interaction, you know, they need to one of the first things I realized after COVID That was so interesting to me is when we finally got kids back in the room, we still have the masks on and everything you know, but kids are finally back in the room, we don't have to be on computer screens anymore. And I said to students, okay, we're gonna get in these groups, and everybody like you're going to talk about this one topic. And everybody kind of sat there and didn't know what to do like, now was the time to get up and interact, I see that that is balancing are kind of reducing. So now if I say to students, hey, we're gonna get in a group, like they'll move to the same area of the room, I still have to say, the best way to have a conversation is when you can look at the person you're conversing with. So let's and the phrase I always use is let's circle the wagons let's turn our desks to face one another so we can have a conversation rather than having parallel conversations. We want to have face to face conversations. And one of the other teachers here at Minooka has actually mentioned in a department meeting before she said, I've found that I've had to encourage my students to have conversations just with me, like when they come into our classroom in the morning and she says good more
Running are how are you? They don't respond. So she's done some things where she's like, this is what it means to have a conversation. And I can honestly say I never would have imagined that that would have been something that I'd have to teach kids how to have a conversation. But I do see that kids struggle with that. They certainly struggle with the face to face part. And a conversational skills are not always, I think, where we as adults would think their conversational skills should be. But I do think that's rebounding. So for example, my fourth our class that just finished here, primarily freshmen in a drama class. I mean, that's in and of itself, a different kind of animal. But when I said to these kids, alright, today, you're going to get together and you're going to work on your Greek play projects. They hopped right up, they moved right in, got to work, circled themselves up, some of them camped out on the floor, I played some Broadway musical soundtracks, and we had a big sing along while they worked on their project. So you know that I do think it's coming back. Some of that too, I think comes from like the environment a teacher creates in their classroom as well, for sure. And I think that also, you might not have a similar experience in an algebra class, or something like that. Musicals show too, right? But it does create a sense of community if nothing else, you find it where you might be.
Well, Heather, thank you so much for taking the time today during your busy day to do this and speak with us and we look forward to having the only Communication and Theater Association on our campus.
We are so excited to be there, and we're looking forward to it too. So I'm very thankful for the opportunity for me to share a little bit about ICTA what we do and we'll see you soon.
We spoke with Heather Danek, who teaches Speech and Drama at Minooka High School and is First Vice President of the Illinois communications and theater Association. The group is holding their annual convention at Heartland Community College. If you are interested in other interviews about education, humanities, or other topics, subscribe to random acts of knowledge on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you found this one. Thanks for listening.
