In Spring 2025, as one of the service-learning projects for my Community-Based Theatre class, my students gave two workshops in community-building and theatre-based history to 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders in the 21st-Century afterschool program at J.J. Harris Elementary. Alongside our study and training in the practice of community-based theatre, we studied the history of the pioneering (but hardly known) namesake of their school, Judia Jackson Harris (1870-1960), an illustrious Black woman educator who ran a school for Black children (against threats from the KKK) here in Athens. The site of her former school is just down the road from the elementary school, but many people are unfamiliar with Judia Jackson Harris and the history of her school. We collaborated with my colleague Dr. Jane McPherson (School of Social Work), and realized this project under the auspices of her Complex Cloth project: Dr. McPherson has been doing original, community-engaged research into the history of Judia Jackson Harris, and my students drew from that pioneering research to devise original scenes. McPherson and I formulated this theatre project in dialogue with our community partners, specifically, J.J. Harris Principal Dr. Beverly Harper and the Director of the afterschool program, Ms. Alon Hammond. In addition to the wish to make Judia Jackson Harris's history present and alive today for the students, the school staff identified the need to help their students to present themselves effectively, speak clearly, and get over the “stage fright” of everyday life. My students and I prepared our two workshops to meet those identified community needs. UGA students learned experientially, by applying course content in community-based theatre techniques and performing the archive. The workshops were stunning moments of community engagement and theatre-based learning that surpassed our expectations. The J.J. Harris students were very interested in the theatre games and scenes, and were so excited, at the end of the first workshop, to learn that the class was coming back for a second. The Clarke County School District publicized the workshop on their Facebook. The Community-Based Theatre class prepared this educational packet in order to make our workshop content accessible to other educators and school staff, in the hopes that the material will be shared more widely, and the experience reproduced for several groups of students. This project was sponsored by a Support Grant from UGA's Office of Service-Learning and the Department of Theatre & Film Studies. We also benefited from a collaboration with Hannah Eppling, expert in children's theatre and founder and artistic director of Little Characters.
