ABSTRACT
In quality theatre classrooms, students use connecting processes and the associated connecting literacies daily by relating artistic ideas and work with personal meaning and external context. Theatre-based creative collaboration frequently includes cooperative efforts in which teams of artists interact to envision, develop, and generate ideas about how themes, concepts, or even full-length plays might be staged or presented to an audience. Theatre teachers can prepare students to participate in the collaborative, creative processes by introducing opportunities for them to make connections actively between their own ideas and those of others. This chapter explores the collaboration by suggesting that students, participating together in theatre creation spaces, can truly form communities of practice in which artists explore a dialectic between ideas or a conversation in which every person's ideas are explored and interrogated. It also proposes that young theatre artists should inquire actively outside of their own experience as they prepare to be more experienced theatre artists.
