In part one of our Innovators Artists, and Solutions interview with Elizabeth Bruce, we discuss the origin of the Theatrical Journey Project. In part two, we discuss the challenges inherent in developing a labor-intensive, hands-on learning experience, particularly in a world increasingly focused on virtual learning. Elizabeth talks about the importance of creating a sacred space for learning where deep engagement happens.

Michael: Welcome to the Innovators, Artists, and Solutions series of Creativists in Dialogue, a podcast embracing the creative life. I’m Michael Oliver, and yes, where’s Elizabeth? Elizabeth Bruce is not our host today on Creativists in Dialogue, but our guest. As some of you no doubt know, Elizabeth is not just a fiction writer—her collection of short stories Universally Adored and Other One-Dollar Stories, see link in her bio—she is also the innovator of a remarkable early childhood learning experience: the Theatrical Journey Project, introducing science to early learners through guided pretend play. Now, as you describe on your website, Elizabeth, “the Journey Project is an immersive, hands on, constructivist methodology that deeply engages early learners through tactile simulations of real science phenomena.” The history of this project is not only a wonderful example of innovation from the grassroots, but also instructive of how innovations come into being in the first place. Frequently not in the hallowed halls of elite institutions, but when regular people do extraordinary things. And that’s exactly why I decided, as your co-host, to interview you and your development of the Theatrical Journey Project. I would say, “Welcome, Elizabeth,” but because you’re always here, it doesn’t seem appropriate. So, I’ll just ask you, what does it feel like to be on the other side of the question?

Elizabeth: Oh, it is so much harder to be the interviewee than the interviewer. Asking questions is a lot easier than answering them.

Michael: Yes.

Elizabeth: But! I will do my best to gather my thoughts and be concise. Brevity, as you well know, Michael, from our 41 years together, is not my strong suit.

Michael: Okay, I’ll do my best to try to keep things as brief as possible. So let’s just launch right in. So, Elizabeth, from what I know about the Theatrical Journey Project—and I did assist you on some of the technical editing of the book about the project, what has always, what’s fascinated me about the project are its role-playing aspects. So please, before we launch into its innovative elements, could you describe what a theatrical journey is?

Elizabeth: As you said in your intro, Michael, the Theatrical Journey Project, which was developed at award-winning community-based nonprofit, CentroNía, is a guided pretend play methodology in which the young children, who are generally three to five years old, assume the roles of science problem solvers and enter an imaginary world where there’s some kind of science emergency. So the journey guide, who is generally an adult—I was the journey guide, for example—goes with them as their colleague and fellow scientist and gently guides the narrative. So just like in a play or a film or a story, there is a quote, “narrative,” something has gone wrong and the heroes, i.e. the children, have to fix it, complete with action one, two, three, et cetera. And. there is ultimately a plot resolution. Unlike a play or a movie, however, theatrical journeys are participatory. They’re full of full body, hands-on, tactile explorations of real science phenomenon using simple gadgets, sensory materials, or other kid-friendly props.

So, truly, journeys are really dense learning experiences. The children don’t really know that. They just know that it’s fun and deeply engaging. But every element of a journey is hugely intentional. From the physical and vocal warmups to the rituals of entering and exiting the theatrical space—the quote, “world of the play”—to the narratives and problem solving of every journey, to all the tactile props, the cognitive and language development techniques, the science content, the play-based behavior management techniques, the cool down, etc., etc. They’re all very intentional.

Michael: If I understand you correctly, so the children assume the role of hero, the hero being the scientist or the doctor and they enter this imaginary space as that scientist to then solve the problem.

Elizabeth: They are the skilled science problem solvers.

Michael: Okay. Now, do you have any scientific training?

Elizabeth: No, absolutely not. I have a sweet little BA in English—go English majors—from a great liberal arts college. But I didn’t study science at university. I did have some great science teachers in my earlier years, particularly a Mr. Zerfanidis in I think it was a sixth grade who would change something in the classroom every day and query us about our powers of observation. And we’d have to see what he had changed in the classroom. I loved my high school chem class and my high school biology classes. I found chemistry to be just elegant. Everything works out. There’s this kind of inherent balance. It’s really beautiful. And I really dug dissecting a frog and then a cat and I wasn’t grossed out about it except the formaldehyde stung your fingers if you had any cuts or anything on it, but I never really went beyond those basic courses.

Michael: But you, didn’t you grow up in a scientific family?

Elizabeth: Yeah, I did. I, as I say in the playbook, I come from a family of scientists. My dad, my late father, E. Ivan Bruce Jr., was a professor of psychiatry and a former World War II Navy doc. And my mom, the late Reba Lamie Bruce was an RN and also a former World War II Navy nurse. So my siblings and I grew up swimming in medical lingo. Nobody in our house ever had a, quote, “stomachache.” You had, quote, “gastrointestinal distress.” You “voided your bladder” or “evacuated your colon,” etc. And I had a bunch of uncles, all now deceased, but they were engineers, both in civilian life and during World War II. One of my uncles on my mom’s side was a decorated fighter pilot. My younger brother, Barry Bruce, Dr. Barry Bruce, is a molecular plant biologist and biochemist and tenured professor who runs a research lab at UT Knoxville and my sister Patty studied psychology and nursing.

Michael: Okay, so you’re well-acquainted with the scientific sort of environments and thinking, the language of the scientists.

Elizabeth: Yeah, yeah. Growing up, as I talk about in the playbook it was really memorable, the time that I spent behind the scenes and scientific and medical settings. My dad who not only taught at the medical school in Galveston, but he had a small private practice within the state mental health system, frequently would take one of us kids with him on the weekend when he did his rounds of his inpatients and then he’d take us behind the scenes at the anatomy lab where there were all these cadavers and all these organs and jars of formaldehyde. And we got to watch operations and go into the dietary and custodial sections. And then, my father, who was quite the charmer, whenever we went on family vacations, he would sweet talk his way into factories or canneries, so we’d get to see the systems and mechanisms behind making sugar or bottling Coca Cola or canning sardines or something. So it was years later, truly, as an adult, that I realized what an enormous privilege this was to be granted access to all these inner workings of these complex systems.

Michael: So, it sounds like the deep origin story of the Theatrical Journey Project, was that you have, as an English major, you have a sort of a cranium in narrative and in the construction of narrative and in story, but then at the personal level, you grew up swimming in scientific sort of thinking and data, etc. And you’ve combined those two, your love of narrative with the scientific methodology, etc., to create this wonderful project, the Theatrical Journey Project. 

Elizabeth: Yeah.

Michael: Now, to get into a more immediate sort of—‘cause I think it’s very, an important element of any innovative project is its origin story. So please tell us about the genesis of this program at CentroNía, this project of the Theatrical Journey Project. Were there earlier manifestations of the project? Where did the ideas come from? And if so, how, how did you learn from these earlier manifestations and these other ideas?

Elizabeth: I’d been a teaching artist and an arts administrator at CentroNía for many years. I have a long relationship both as an employee and as a consultant when you and I, Michael, through our organization, Sanctuary Theatre, used to lead these participatory drama workshops in CentroNía’s school-age program years ago, back in the old church.

And then I spent a year or so working with our dear friend and fellow theater artist and educator, Sarah Pleydell in these wonderful hands-on multisensory drama workshops at CentroNía’s early childhood program. I spent eight years working with my good friend Nucky Walder at Teatro de la Luna in what we called a bilingual drama literacy project that was both at CentroNía and at Bancroft Elementary School in DC.

And I also want to mention the child-centered and art creation pedagogies that were really masterfully modeled and created by both the late great Oran Sandel, who was artistic director, co-artistic director, and a 25-year long veteran of DC’s legendary Living Stage Company, as well as the visual art artist and teaching artist, Manuel Navarrete, who worked at CentroNía and both multiple universities, including the Corcoran for many years. So both of these fellows had really masterful teaching methodologies that I watched and really tried to learn from.

But to answer your question about the genesis of this particular iteration of the Journey Project, interestingly, many years ago, during one of the budget constraint times at CentroNía that nonprofits go into, anyone who was not working directly with children was at risk of getting laid off. That included me, because at that time, I was administering, I was an arts administrator administering the multidisciplinary arts program and supervising a whole bunch of other teaching artists, but I wasn’t working directly with children. And then in the period of time after 9-11 and with all these horrible school shootings and these terrifying scenarios, there were schools and learning institutions all across the country developing and implementing emergency readiness plans. So CentroNía, like other nonprofits, dove deeply into preparing its own emergency readiness, and we had a lot of in-service trainings and various other explanations and drills on these protocols. And there was, at that time, there were lots of funding streams to support community organizations and schools in their emergency preparedness.

So, during all these in-service trainings I and others became concerned about the emotional impact, the emotional effect of all these drills on very young children. So I suggested that we develop some kind of theatrical simulations. It would indeed guide children on how to respond to emergencies, but it would do so through an imaginary pretend play process that empowered them, the children, to have some agency over their reactions and compliance and to trust that there were, in fact, helpers, emergency responders, and teachers, and adults who were there to help and protect them.

So, I thought there might be some funding for this kind of thing. And my impulse, I think, was spot on, but it became apparent that even though the leadership at CentroNía really liked this idea, there really wasn’t funding for things that had been untested, that were not already, quote, “evidence-based.” But, anyway, so that impulse of preparing children for emergency responses led me back into the classroom. And I decided not to focus on emergency preparedness, but to focus on science content because very young children get very little science in early childhood. It’s just not a standard part of the curriculum. I decided to revisit all the participatory drama workshops that I had done with you during Sanctuary Theatres residency at CentroNía with Sarah, et c., etc. So that’s what it led to. And then, happily, CentroNía was able to redirect its funding toward the support of this particular project through its ongoing arts education funding.

Michael: So, you wanted to give them some early experiences, these three- to five-year-olds, some early scientific training. But if you could maybe get specific—because every innovator project hopes to achieve certain results. So specifically, what would you say were the main objectives of that very first theatrical journey experience?

Elizabeth: I would say it was to—

Michael: Do you remember what was the very first journey you did? What was it called? Do you remember?

Elizabeth: Oh, probably. I, this is such a good question. There were various iterations and things that I did that preceded this kind of official theatrical journey, but I probably, it was probably the Journey of the Sick Teddy Bear. That’s the greatest hits. That’s the number one journey that everyone loves.

Michael: So you developed this, the Journey of the Sick Teddy Bear.

Elizabeth: Right.

Michael: What were the objectives? What did you hope the children, the three- to five-year-olds, would gain from that experience?

Elizabeth: So, among the early objectives were to model at the narrative level, at the journey level—there were other objectives for the warmups and other rituals—but at the journey level, I would say it was to model certain scientific foundational science logic models, if you will, the whole notion of looking at the evidence. What is happening? Let’s look at the evidence. Don’t just assume what’s happening. Let’s see what the evidence tells us. The whole notion that there’s cause and effect. So the Journey of the Sick Teddy Bear, for example, is, we have a bunch of little cute little teddy bears and the children get a phone call during the warm up, end of the warm up, and it’s the teddy bear’s parents or mom or dad or family, and they’re all in a tizzy because the teddy bear is sick. So, are there any teddy bear doctors here? So the children have to become the teddy bear doctors, and they put on their lab coats and their teddy bear doctor hats. And we go over to the laboratory and we examine the teddy bear and we do this kind of general health assessment. And then we take a throat swab as I’m sure any parent of a young child has been—

Michael: All right. So the child becomes the, both the parent and the doctor. The teddy bear becomes like—

Elizabeth: The sick child. Yeah.

Michael: Okay. And so they bring the sick child, the sick teddy bear to the doctor. That’s one of the kids now is—

Elizabeth: The kids are all the doctors, yes.

Michael: Alright. And so they’ve got the equivalent of a sick child and they’re examining the sick child.

Elizabeth: Right. After doing a kind of health assessment of their temperature and their eyes and their ears, and they do a sort of whole-body checkup—

Michael: Probably things that a young child, they’re accustomed to experiencing it themselves when go to the doctor.

Elizabeth: Right. But then, because it turns out the teddy bear has a sore throat, we do a throat swab. So I have these tongue depressors and we get the teddy bear to open her mouth and the children mimicking all of this, and they take a few cells from the back of the teddy bear’s throat, and they culture it on a petri dish. So I have these little plastic petri dishes that are real petri dishes, they’re just mass produced, and you culture the throat swab on the petri dish.

Michael: Okay, so at that point they’re, you’re entering, the children are entering the realm of things that they’re not familiar with.

Elizabeth: Exactly. Exactly. So they probably had their tongue swabbed from a tongue depressor if they’re, suspected to have strep throat or something. So then we culture it in a petri dish. And I should insert here that this journey, I subsequently discovered it takes two days because there are multiple steps. So, at first I was trying to cram it all into one day, but now it’s a two-part journey. Anyway, you culture it in the Petri dish. You swab the Petri dish. You put it in the incubation oven, which is also a new concept. It’s just a little box, it’s not a real oven. And then time goes by and you mark off the time that it takes to culture a Petri dish and then you come back and you start examining it under the microscope. So we have these little magnifying glasses. And you start—and in between part one and part two, I’ve replaced the empty Petri dish with a Petri dish that has an enlarged colorful photo of some kind of microorganism, of the streptococcus bacteria or something. So they’re introduced to a multiplied magnification of a streptococcus bacteria or anything. And then this, so that’s the evidence, is there is something growing inside the teddy bear’s throat.

And then we have to go to cause and effect. We have to start trying to test different medications, different pharmaceuticals, or different substances that will fight the bacteria. So we use a lot of shaving cream and Q tips. And often the shaving cream is in a little plastic test tube. We also use a lot of little pipettes, these little mini plastic pipettes that are real pipettes. They’re just very kid friendly and super cheap. So then you apply Substance A and Substance B and then you re-examine the petri dish with the magnifying glass. Is it killing the bacteria? What is working? Which particular treatment modality?

Michael: So you’re bringing in backstory at that point, because obviously the doctor that does the swab and then does the, puts it in the incubator, it comes up as a particular, bacteria, they already know what then can treat that. But now you’re going into the back—how do your—

Elizabeth: How do you determine—

Michael: —figure out what’s going to treat it? And then it comes—

Elizabeth: Exactly. It’s, yeah, you’re rewinding the videotape, but they’re—and then they magically transition from the pediatrician to the microbiologist.

Michael: Your narrative training comes into effect at that point. You’ve created a more complete sort of story.

Elizabeth: Yeah. So, it’s, it’s pre-amoxicillin or penicillin or something. They have to rediscover penicillin or whatever, and then there’s all of this chatter between the journey guide and the children about what is happening and what do you see and describe what—and to try to surface this larger, more complex language about what are they seeing? What did they discover?

And as we’ve talked about in other conversations, anything the child says is valid. There are no wrong answers in journey class. It’s improvisational rule number one. It’s “yes, and” not “yes, but.” If the child discovers a dinosaur in the Petri dish, that’s okay. You have to call in the paleontologist or something. So you, the child, eventually the children figure out, yes, some particular substance is killing the bacteria. So then you then you give the teddy bear a dose number one, dose number two of medication, such and such.

Michael: And ultimately, I guess the teddy bear is healed.

Elizabeth: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. We frequently—

Michael: And that’s when the journey ends, is when the teddy bear is healed?

Elizabeth: Yeah, usually we put the teddy bear to bed. That’s a kind of ritual is that whoever, whatever creature is the sort of person or the entity in need of help, they frequently go to sleep and we sing a little lullaby to them.

Michael: Oh, okay. Alright. So in, in terms of what you hope the child will gain from that experience, what would you say is the number one thing you hope they gain from that experience?

Elizabeth: I would say the number one thing is that the child images themselves as skilled and capable problem solvers. That they have the agency, they have the know-how, they belong in the problem-solving realm. Whether it’s a science problem or a, some sort of housing problem or some other kind of problem, that they are capable of entering into that problem solving role.

Michael: Okay. But they’re developing the problem-solving skill and they’re capable of actually pursuing a solution based upon some sort of—

Elizabeth: Yeah. There’s a process and there’s skill sets, and there’s, yeah, methodologies, but they can master those.

Michael: And so that’s the number one. What are some of the other skills that you think are developed? Let’s just focus on skills, I guess.

Elizabeth: Sure. At some point we should talk about the physical and vocal warm ups because there’s a bunch of skills in those. But during the journey itself, I would say at the science content level, we’re introducing, as I mentioned, the looking at the evidence and cause and effect and the fact that there are systems and cycles and certain kinds of arrangements of real phenomenon. But also, there’s a kind of very intentional step-by-step process, that solving a problem is a multi-step problem, which can convey to both life and science and any kind of learning, any kind of problem solving.

So there’s intricate step one. And then you reassess. And there’s intricate step two. So that models that kind of conscientiousness, I think, is one of the big psychological characteristics that is associated with, certainly with school success. So there’s an incremental nature, there’s a deliberateness and a kind of focus on detail. As a side note, there is frequently a mark-making or written, some kind of symbolic thinking aspect that accompanies it. They write in their science journal, or they fill out a chart or something. So there’s this notion of very deliberate observation, which is a core science skill, notation, evaluation, etc. So, at the science level—it doesn’t have to just be science content—but at the sort of mental model level, there’s this notion of, you have a problem, let’s try to solve it in a logical capacity.

Michael: So the problem solving skill is the primary skill, but then it sounds like you’ve associated these various, what are called habits of mind, where all of the journeys have this deliberateness, this recording of data, this i.e. record keeping, etc., so that you can then repeat what you’ve discovered, or you can look at it and examine what you’ve discovered of the process or method that you’ve used. So all of those sort of are part of it.

Elizabeth: And there isn’t necessarily one answer. There could be multiple explanations. So there’s an on, that number one improv rule of “yes, and” which validates all the child’s loops of imagination.

Michael: Alright, so let’s explore that because that sort of gets into this question of—and this is a favorite of mine—is critical thinking skills. And whenever I think of critical thinking skills the primary definition of a critical thinking skill is your ability to wrestle with multiple possible answers.

Elizabeth: Right.

Michael: So how does the theatrical journey develop critical thinking skills?

Elizabeth: Certainly by not putting forth a teacher-declared solution. We are in this together. There is no, quote, “teacher” there is just the journey guide who is a colleague. The journey guide is guiding the journey and the kids don’t, they don’t forget that you’re an adult and that you’re in charge. But it is that notion that it is a process of exploration and that there are various, particularly, as you say, the habits of mind or the leaps of imagination, all the open ended questions—what do you see? What does it look like? What’s happening? All of these things that do not have a one-word answer. They’re not yes or no questions. They’re not, “What color is that?” “It’s red.” That’s a non-open-ended question. So there’s all of this sort of elaboration on what is the child’s observation? What are their thoughts? What is their analysis? So really validating whatever the child comes up with and encouraging them to go deeper. That to me is a part of the whole foundation of critical thinking, that they have the ability to scan the horizon, see things, run it through their analytical frames, and posit an answer. And that answer is both validated and details are extracted through the interaction and open-ended questioning of it. Plus, as we mentioned, these kind of habits of observation and cause and effect, etc.

Michael: Now, one way I love the look at innovation is it’s not a one-shot deal. Innovation doesn’t just spring out of Zeus’s head, so to speak, fully born. It usually evolves. It comes, the first manifestation of an innovation is raw, it’s crude, it comes into existence, but then it evolves and ultimately what it evolves into is something that is truly innovative.

So could you talk about how the Theatrical Journey Project has evolved over the, say, even the first few years. How did it change? How did it mature? How did, what was the process like that you went through to turn the theatrical journey into something truly innovative?

Elizabeth: Sure. There was a period of time that kind of preceded this narrative-based journey where I was simply working with young children. There were some really challenging classroom behaviors going on in certain classrooms and another colleague asked me to come in and do some enlivening of children’s books. They were, obviously, books and stories are a big part of early childhood. So I went in and I did some enlivening, hands-on arts explorations of children’s books.

And that was fine, but it was a little rote, it wasn’t particularly imaginative. And I really returned, to this narrative foundation that undergirds all the theatrical arts, that undergirds storytelling and writing, and went back to this notion of creating a narrative arc, if you will. So that there is a problem, as any movie or play or book has a problem, and then there are obstacles to overcome in solving that problem. In literature and fiction, it’d be complication.

And so I really applied my mental faculties to trying to look at a piece of content, some kind of, some sort of science problem and tried to figure out what is a storyline that would explore this phenomenon in a way that is accessible to the very young child? How can you make the sick teddy bear not just a fact, but some kind of narrative problem that needs to be solved through some sort of problem-solving process. And that really goes back to my theater training and my literary training because narrative arc is not a default. It’s not just let’s do some fun hands-on things that explore why the leaves turn colors, but let’s really dig down and see what the narrative structure is.

Michael: So, as you mentioned with the Journey of the Sick Teddy Bear, it started off as, it’s just a one-part story that happens over, what, 20-25 minutes.

Elizabeth: Something like that. Yeah.

Michael: Now it’s a two-part.

Elizabeth: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, and we’ve expanded it. Yeah.

Michael: It’s expanded, but it’s also, it’s evolved. So your understanding of the experience and how it relates to the children or how the children relate to your, to the play, the narrative, grew and evolved to the point where you said, I need to divide this up into two. And if I understand you right, you divided it between the putting of the swab culture into the Petri dish, it’s a natural ending of the first part, right?

Elizabeth: Into the incubation oven, yeah. And suddenly you have the culture.

Michael: And so how much did the children’s reactions to theatrical journeys, how much did that impact the development of the theatrical journey itself?

Elizabeth: Yeah, I think that’s a great question. And obviously I’m not, I’m not an early childhood classroom teacher. I’m going into this as a learning experience myself, not just as someone who’s creating a project. But among the things that I discovered pretty early on is that a goal, a new goal, a particular goal that I embraced early on, is to do whatever I could to deepen and prolong the deep engagement of the child with the process. Because kids today are just bombarded with instant and ever moving content. Cartoons on TV, jump around, there’s just no kind of prolonged experience of looking and feeling and observing something. So I wanted to extend attention span, if you will. So I slowed it down. And the teachers were very instructive in saying, “This is going too fast. There’s too much novelty. It’s so breathless. We have to slow it down.” So I slowed it down and found a good, kind of narrative dividing point, between part A and part B and then part three. So that was part of it, to slow it down and to really allow the kids to just deepen their engagement. And then, my job, or the journey guide’s job, is to add sort of new component parts, to add a new color to the medicine or to add a different application or something.

Another thing that I discovered that took me a while, but I realized that the kids, you go through part one and then part two and then we did a whole part three of the NIH microbiology lab and discovering some mystery bacteria. And, it was, we went on and on. But then I would repeat the journey. So the kids love to come back and redo a journey because then they know what to do. They feel such a sense of competence that they enter the theatrical world with—it’s like the actor coming back after rehearsal, it’s so much more fun because you have—

Michael: So then it’s not just the experience. It becomes the ritual.

Elizabeth: Yeah. Yeah.

Michael: The actual journey becomes a ritual that they engage in.

Elizabeth: Right. Exactly. And after you’ve started a journey process with a new crop of kids in a new academic year, then they’re ready. They know the process, they know all the warmup rituals. And so there’s a thrill of being confident and knowing what to do and being skilled and becoming ever more expert in their expertise, if you will. So that was a development, a kind of pedagogical development that, that came from doing it and also getting feedback.

Michael: Now, ultimately, now there’s a book. You’ve published a book.

Elizabeth: Yes. Yes.

Michael: On the Theatrical Journey Project. How many journeys are in that book?

Elizabeth: There are 23, quote “scripts,” some of which are a journey part one, part two, part three, some of which are one off. But I call them scripts, as you well know, because you were very instrumental in helping me structure the Journey Playbook.

There’s the Journey of Photosynthesis or the Journey of the Water Cycle. So there’s a content piece and there’s a chart, as you well know, that sort of describes the problem, and then what the props are, and what the setup is and all of that. But then there’s a kind of running dialogue, sample dialogue, that the journey guide engages in, and all the questions, and then there’s in the, on the left column there’s the dialogue and on the right column there’s what I call stage directions. What are the actions and what are the preparatory things that the journey guide does in order to keep the narrative moving forward. So if you introduce a new prop or if you introduce a new component part of the narrative, that’s all described behind the scenes. I use the term stage directions because it isn’t something you say out loud. It’s just what you were doing when you get to this point in the journey. What is the journey guide doing? And the, this is way down in the weeds, but the props are divided into what is set, preset on the journey table in the journey laboratory and what is at the ready kind of behind the scenes covered up, so the kids don’t get distracted by something fancy.

Michael: Each journey is its own theatrical production.

Elizabeth: It is. It’s very much fashioned after a play and with all the stage management and props and costumes and lighting if we had it, we don’t usually have lighting elements.

Michael: Now, CentroNía basically was the institution that basically brought the, allowed you to bring the Theatrical Journey Project into being. So how did they help make this thing possible?

Elizabeth: Oh, CentroNía with whom, with which I have had, or until I retired, I had a 30-plus year relationship. So CentroNía was just this incredibly rich incubating and welcoming environment. I had such a long history, and I was given this tremendous artistic freedom, just immense artistic freedom in all my many years of collaboration with CentroNía, both under the leadership of the founder and longtime executive director and CEO, Bibi, Beatriz “BB” Otero, as well as under the leadership of the current CEO, president and CEO, Myrna Peralta. Both of them really embraced all of this creative freedom and gave me kind of the space and the freedom and materials and the physical space and an office and all the things that are the mechanical aspects of coming up with something new. So it was a long process. And then the development department—CentroNía has had, has always had this amazingly hardworking development department—we really, they went in search of funding and they redirected the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities funding toward this project.

Michael: Then another funder, and if I recall, this funder was one of the reasons why the book, the publishing of the book was made possible was the McCarthey Dressman Educational Foundation? So what is that foundation and how did that go, how did that help the development of the product?

Elizabeth: This was just, the sort of heavens opened up and there was this incredible funding opportunity. The McCarthey Dressman Education Foundation is a family foundation that’s national, and they give fellowships to individual educators, not to the institution or the schools, but they give funding to teachers and educators who are either in schools or community-based organizations to incubate and realize and develop innovative projects. So I was incredibly fortunate thanks to my colleague Diana Alonzo Watkins and the then CentroNía development person’s sharp eyes finding out about the McCarthey Dressman folks. So I we applied for a fellowship and I got the first of the first three year fellowship to develop the program and develop the playbook. It was some significant money. It was 10K a year for three years to really expand this program and develop the guide, the manual, this very—

Michael: You say significant funding, but ultimately, considering all the funding that is given to other things, this, it was helpful funding.

Elizabeth: Yeah, it was, but it was enough extra money so that some of the—because CentroNía, like any nonprofit, it has they, their budget is so tight, money is so tight. There’s, you’ve got your essential objective as a community-based organization and if you’re going to deviate from that central purpose, you got to have the money to do it. Or somebody’s got to do it for free or something, because just keeping the wheels of your operation going takes a pretty much everything you’ve got. So this is value added. The Journey Project was definitely, quote, “value added.” It’s become a really wonderful innovation, but it’s hard to justify paying for this when you can’t pay your classroom teachers.

So the McCarthey Dressman Education Foundation fellowships gave us, gave me personally the extra money to hire you as a developmental editor to pay some of the costs of this brilliant graphic designer, Gina, Virginia Robles-Villalba, to my good friend Naomi Ayala is the transcription editor. We had an in-house translator, Lila Guadamuz Reed was our CentroNía translator, but hiring an editor is extra.

So that was the first three years, so that whole project and playbook development was really supported heavily by the McCarthey Dressman Foundation. Then they gave me another three-year foundation fellowship by invitation, they invited me to apply for what’s called teacher training or kind of project replication. And that was a whole other bunch of wonderful activities that I’d love to tell you about.

Tremendous thanks to all our listeners. To those of you who are free subscribers, please consider becoming paid subscribers so that Creativists in Dialogue can continue bringing you insightful conversations about creativity from Washington, DC, and beyond. Thanks.

Special shout out to Creativists in Dialogue’s production team: Audio engineer Elliot Lanes and transcription editor Morgan Musselman. Thank you all.

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The Creativists in Dialogue podcast is supported in part by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and subscribers like you. The Theatre in Community podcast series is supported in part by Humanities DC. Thanks.