High School Theatre Leadership

A medium where citizens and students can gain an understanding and perspective into the more immaterial questions of life, the arts always have been essential to the functioning of a successful society as well as a component of a well-rounded curriculum (Goodman, 2015). Appel (2006) evokes the spirit of the arts through Leonardo da Vinci, the “original” Renaissance man – artist, inventor, astronomer, mathematician and leader - who drew inspiration from everything around him. During DaVinci’s time, the arts were a required part of any educational curriculum, whether formal or informal. A means to reflect on the human condition, the arts were “considered inseparable from the sciences and other academic disciplines” and a vital part of community

The arts, particularly theatre, naturally seem to connect with leadership. The literature review also revealed numerous assumptive associations between the two but few empirical findings. This study first aims to examine whether participation in a high school theatre program creates leaders in college. A further discovery of this study is to examine whether skills gained during high school theatre engender certain traits inherent to leadership, such as independence, control, communication, confidence, commitment, and resourcefulness (Milgram, 2003). Undergraduate students and recent graduates of college were the focus of this study that sought to uncover a connection between theatre and leadership, providing further evidence of the positive effects of the arts. The college students were surveyed using a leadership survey adapted from the Center for Creative Leadership’s (CCL®) Campbell Leadership Designator (CLD), self-rating on leadership traits, as well as notating whether or not they had taken on any leadership

Both theatre and leadership share a natural bond, according to Jelinek and Sutherland (2015), as the two are “an emotional, embodied, and interactive phenomenon between people” (p. 298), and Siedel (1996) refers to the “seemingly natural connection” (p. 18) between the two. In theory, the undertakings inherent in drama and theatre appear to engender, utilize, and necessitate leadership skills; however, it is not clear if the theatre contributes to leadership, or if leadership is naturally present in theatre students. This generates several larger questions about where and how leadership develops (specifically, if the theatre can engender leadership) and whether or not people naturally need to have “leadership-type” traits to be leaders. Because there is a paucity of empirical research on a correlation between participation in theatre and leadership, the study sought to find an association between the two. The purpose of this study was to discover if participation in high school theatre has a positive effect on college students’ leadership skills and their participation in leadership roles. A potential benefit of this study may be to provide evidence of the positive leadership abilities that can emerge from involvement in the arts, specifically high school