Mark Metcalf
PODCAST

“Teaching life skills through stage skills”

By - Mar 3rd, 2011 04:00 am

Photo (and cover image) by Mark Frohna.

With a slew of budget cuts forcing schools in Milwaukee and across the nation to cut art and library programs, the question being begged is, “How will this impact children?”

First Stage Managing Director Rob Goodman

This week we invite Rob Goodman, Managing Director and Founder of First Stage Children’s Theater and Academy, to be a guest on this podcast. A longtime advocate of the arts in Milwaukee, Goodman believes that arts education leaves a lasting impression on children, fostering a sense of empowerment through creativity.

Through arts education, students learn to be more open not only with others, but with themselves. By polishing essential qualities like team building and confidence, students are able to express themselves individually and collectively.

While the battle over Wisconsin’s budget is being waged in Madison, academic budgets in Milwaukee are feeling the wrath as art programs fall to the wayside. On today’s podcast, Rob and I discuss the unfathomable effect that arts education can have on growth and development as well academic achievement, and also how arts training translates into the workforce and boosts the local economy.

Listen now:

(Windows Media Player)

(Quicktime)

Learn more about First Stage Children’s Theater and Academy, click here.

Subscribe to Backstage with Mark Metcalf through iTunes here.

0 thoughts on “PODCAST: “Teaching life skills through stage skills””

  1. Anonymous says:

    Good for you! The arts are about so much more than the arts, aren’t they? In addition to all the life-skill features you describe, they’re about wisdom. Somehow we are so focused on economic issues these days that we begin to think that economics is what life is about. We’ve forgotten about wisdom, forgotten that hundreds of great artists have examined the questions we are facing in our own lives and there’s so much we can learn from them. This disregard for all of this wisdom seems so foolish and arrogant, but it seems like the way of the world these days — or at least the way of Wisconsin!

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