ACCESSIBILITY & INCLUSION
I cultivate a holistic, inclusive learning environment, focused on dialogic learning, allowing students to kindle their interests within the context of the subject matter. I consciously tailor teaching and assessment strategies to nurture the diverse intelligences of each student, utilizing lecture, interactive activities, small group work, discussion, writing prompts, and play. I teach with enthusiasm, believing that my love of learning translates into student engagement and I treat students as co-learners.
EMPATHY
Disagreement, when facilitated with courage and compassion, is generative to learning and is paramount to developing empathy. I establish an environment of collaboration, valuing all voices and honoring different perspectives. The social justice lens that guides my work is Augusto Boal’s cry to create “theatre for liberation.” I strive to generate theatre that asks: what bars our way toward individual and collective freedom? I believe that change is forged in relationship and community.
EMBODIMENT
As a director and educator, I balance mind and body, instead of creating a hierarchy of either. While I value historical study and am propelled by theory and philosophy, I am also convinced that we have much to learn from the wisdom of our bodies. I cultivate attention to the narrative of our physical responses and allow that to inform our understanding of text and methodologies, as we seek to understand “Word made flesh.”
QUESTIONS
I embrace Freirean pedagogy and am averse to answers. When students are encouraged to wrestle with questions, they may be unbound from performative learning. Together, we explore what a scene or play is asking of us and how we can draw audiences into those questions with us. Art “calls into question what we thought we knew, and who we thought we were…asks more than we could ever answer…and in so doing, unfixes those of us who encounter it” (Gay, 2022, p. 161).
My goal is to provide college students, community members, and fellow creatives the opportunity to process defining experiences and engage with the world from a place of hope. The work I make and teach varies dramatically in scope and presentation but is unified by awe, inquiry, and “joy as an act of resistance.”
“The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy.”
bell hooks
Kimberly LaCroix: THEATRE ARTIST & EDUCATOR 