Layla Zeitouni

This project traces the shift to teaching drama as literature in the English classroom, specifically within the context of community college student outcomes, to determine how to increase students' cultural capital through theater. Students at Boston community colleges have little institutional exposure to theater—an activity that statistically draws a white, high-income crowd—and does not offer space or interest for students whose past exposure to theater was high school Common Core Shakespeare. Instead, finding a solution that allows English faculty to increase the presence of drama at schools directly increases cultural capital, indirectly increasing social capital in a city fraught with historic inequities that still challenge student successes today.