CTC Celebrates 19 Years of Neighborhood Bridges at the Crossing Bridges Festival
CTC presents the Crossing Bridges Festival, the culminating event of Neighborhood Bridges on May 7, 8, 15 and 16, 2018. This festival involves over 600 students in 24 classrooms from 11 elementary schools performing captivating stories that have been written and adapted solely by the students. Students choose stories from the Bridges curriculum, analyze it and then reimagine the story through their own perspective. They then create their own costumes and scenery that are unique to their interpretation of the story. The main goal is to motivate students to become the narrators of their own lives.
Co-founded by Peter C. Brosius and Jack Zipes, Neighborhood Bridges is a nationally recognized, 27-week intensive program that teaches students critical literacy skills by teaching them to question power and assumptions in text, embrace complex thinking and multiple perspectives, solve problems as a community and transform dominant narratives.
“Neighborhood Bridges is really about the kids feeling and finding agency,” explains Neighborhood Bridges Program Director and teaching artist Maria Asp. “Once they figure out they have the power to change the story and make it their own, then all the kids in the class explode with ideas. The idea that you can change something and make your own gets inside them. Then, when the students get to step onto the big, UnitedHealth Group stage and watch their idea play out in real time, they come away from the experience empowered and transformed, possibly for the first time in their lives.”
In 2017, CTC was the recipient of the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art’s Building Bridges three-year grant for Neighborhood Bridges. The grant will support the program’s efforts to include curriculum centered around the Muslim American experience. Starting this school year through the 2019–2020 school year, Neighborhood Bridges will undergo a major expansion to incorporate 18 stories from the lives of local Somali Muslims into its core curriculum and develop culturally relevant teaching strategies for teachers. It is the program’s hope to provide non-Muslim students with a deeper understanding of the Muslim American experience in the U.S. This year, at least five classrooms will be performing a play based on the stories from this new curriculum.
Children’s Theatre Company Artistic Director and Neighborhood Bridges co-founder Peter C. Brosius stated, “As we finish our 19th year of Neighborhood Bridges, we look back on the amazing successes of the program — growing from one classroom to now 24 classrooms participating in the program, and from being awarded the U.S. Department of Education’s Education Model Development and Dissemination grant in 2005, to receiving the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art’s Building Bridges grant this school year, which has begun to build the bridge between non-Muslim and Muslim students in our schools through empathy, deeper understanding and challenging their assumptions.
Neighborhood Bridges’ Crossing Bridges Festival runs May 7, 8, 15 and 16 at 6pm on the UnitedHealth Group Stage. Performances are free and open to the public to attend. The program and festival are supported by the Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi Foundation for Children, 3M Foundation, Carlson Family Foundation, James B. Linsmayer Foundation, Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community, and Joseph C. and Lillian A. Duke Foundation.
Performance Details
Monday, May 7
Eastern Heights Elementary — Grade 3
Evergreen Park World Cultures School — Grades 4 and 5
Hillcrest Community School — Grade 3
Lincoln Elementary School for the Arts — Grades 4 and 5
Tuesday, May 8
Jefferson Community School — Grade 3
Lyndale Community School — Grade 3
Wellstone International High School — Grades 11 and 12
Tuesday, May 15
Anishinabe Academy — Grades 4 and 5
Jenny Lind Elementary — Grade 3
Lucy Craft Laney Community School — Grade 5
Wednesday, May 16
Garlough Environmental Sciences Magnet — Grades 3 and 4
Little Canada Elementary — Grade 5
No tickets or reservations required — this is a free event to celebrate student voices!
All seating done on a first come, first served basis.
Please enter through the main entrance that is shared with Minneapolis Institute of Art off of 3rd Avenue and make your way up to the 2nd floor — Target Lobby.
