Signature in the Schools: The Voices on Blackwell Island Educational Resources
Hello and welcome to Signature in the Schools’ The Voices on Blackwell Island by Dani Stoller.
This world premiere production looks at institutions big and small limiting the agency of women, the relationship between agency and hope, and how each person takes different aims to improve the world.
We invite you to explore the world of The Voices on Blackwell Island with your students before and after you engage with the production. Each of the sections below provides a full multimedia experience: articles, lesson plans, images and more!
These exercises may be used in many capacities; they do not have to be used in a particular order or in correlation with one another. If there is a resource that is a good match for your curriculum, we hope that you will use it as a supplementary activity. Each article and exercise is deliberately developed to align with goals from the Virginia Standards of Learning (SOLs) for English, Social Studies and Theatre Arts.
The exercises and articles were created by a team of educators and theatrical professionals. Each section includes post-show discussion questions that can be used as inspiration for discussion or as essay prompts.
Additionally, we hope that you will share the student website for the production with your students. Their website includes videos, articles and images to immerse them in the worlds of The Voices on Blackwell Island and its relevance to the material they study with you as well as their own lives. To visit that site, click here.
For more information and questions please reach out to the team at: sigschools@sigtheatre.org.
The World of the Show
Tips and resources for helping students engage critically with the production, a glossary of words and terms in the script that may be unfamiliar to students and a draft of the script.
A State of Mind
A nation is no doubt likely to shift physically, economically and socially over time. Dive into the past, present and future world of mental health in America.
To Believe in Women
Explore your own relationship to the truth of the past, truth in the present and visualize what might truth look like in the not so distant future for all genders.
Exercising Self Civic-Power
Explore the tools you might not realize are at your disposal regardless of age, experience and background and see how you can plant seeds of progress for the future. (This content is best explored post show.)