Since receiving tenure, I have led multi-year, research-practice partnerships in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Poland, and Taiwan. The centerpiece of each initiative is a scalable, applied drama institute model that provides single or multi-day training in DBP. My work in the Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) is funded by the U.S. State Department and delivered in partnership with the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo. Each BiH institute and project is designed to create a professional learning community that:
(1) responds to the challenges and affordances in the complex socio-political environment;
(2) builds new relationships between like-minded educators through an ethic of care; and,
(3) grows and supports local educators’ vision, plans, and partnerships to use the arts to innovate education.
At its core, I use the arts in the BiH applied drama institute project to create a safe and brave space for inter-ethnic educators to spark and mediate sociocultural dialogue about shared educational purposes, and to build new lessons and actions plans to create educational change, across real and imagined divides.
Click here for PDF of the “Interdisciplinary Applied Drama Institute Research Summary”
Research Examples
Web-based curriculum and resources created and produced by Katie Dawson, UT Austin graduate students, and teachers/academics from Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2020-2021
Click image or here to visit the One BiH, One Book program website
Web-based curriculum and resources created and produced by Katie Dawson, UT Austin graduate students, and teachers/academics/artists from Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2022-2023
On-line teaching modules and learning community for BiH teachers and academics created and produced by Katie Dawson and UT Austin graduate students featuring U.S. experts in arts integration in 2022-2023
Click image or here to visit the Arts Integrated Teaching Community website
Impact Stories
UT Austin graduate students describe the impact of working on the applied Drama Institute projects in BiH. Video created for a virtual keynote to open an inter-ethnic university symposium for the Let’s Read project.
Diplomat Elizabeth Blumenthal describes the impact of the Applied Drama Institute Partnership with the U.S. Embassy.
Dr. Alma Žero describes the impact of DBP in BiH.
Work Samples
“Poem for Justice” created by participants at the Applied Drama Institute in BiH, 2019.
Action plans created by BiH teachers and academics describing how they will apply DBP to improve education in their own context.
KATHRYN DAWSON 