[Posted by M. Bogen, 6-25-15]
We live in the age of Big Data. Every sector of life, from baseball to "homeland security," seems to prioritize the crunching of numbers over other activities aimed at improvement and success. Students, parents, teachers, and above all school administrators will tell you that education is no exception. In fact, education might now be the most data-focused field of all, with the survival of a school and its faculty based mainly, or even entirely, on standardized test scores. It is increasingly rare that educators speak of...
In the latest SGI Quarterly, the London-born, Los Angeles-based actor Sabra Williams (right) describes her experience as director of the Actors' Gang Prison Project. Launched in 2006, the project employs theater — specifically the techniques of the 16th-century Italian "people's theater" known as commedia dell'arte — to help prisoners in the California system positively cope with their incarceration...