Students investigate the question, “How can we transform real experiences from our lives or communities into a theater piece that matters to others?” by creating bilingual shadow theater performances rooted in interviews, photographs, oral histories, and museum artifacts. Across the 10-day experience, they engage in authentic project-based learning while building theatre knowledge, scriptwriting in English with bilingual supports, and performance skills in light, silhouette, movement, voice, and collaboration through feedback from peers, teachers, museum educators, English support staff, and community mentors. The experience strengthens content expertise, critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and self-directed learning through meaningful inquiry, application of content knowledge, and ongoing cycles of research, rehearsal, critique, and reflection. It culminates in a polished public performance and exhibition in which students share meaningful community stories with an audience beyond the classroom.

Students will analyze how character, conflict, setting, and theme work together in shadow theater and use interviews, photographs, oral histories, and artifacts to create historically and culturally grounded scenes in response to a real community story. They will write and revise a bilingual script with dialogue, narration, and stage directions in English and Chinese, strengthening academic vocabulary, sentence patterns, speaking, listening, and pronunciation through table reads, rehearsal, and performance. Students will apply principles of light, silhouette, scale, and movement to design and perform translucent shadow puppetry that communicates emotion and meaning to an audience through authentic project work. They will collaborate to make shared artistic decisions, solve performance and design problems, use critique and reflection to improve their work, and explain how real community experiences shaped their final exhibition piece.

Students create a sequence of draft products throughout the camp, including interview notes, artifact evidence charts, story-to-stage journals, bilingual script drafts, puppet and prop prototypes, rehearsal recordings, and feedback voice memos in English or Chinese. In small ensembles, they develop connected shadow theater scenes based on real community stories, using photographs, oral histories, and museum materials to shape character, conflict, setting, and theme while practicing English dialogue, narration, and stage directions. By the end, each group presents a polished bilingual shadow puppet performance package that includes a finished script, handcrafted translucent puppets, simple staging elements, and rehearsal documentation for exhibition. Students also prepare a brief spoken introduction and audience Q&A that explain how their research, revision, and collaboration shaped the final performance.

Begin with a Behind the Screen Spark in which students experiment with flashlights, translucent materials, and simple puppets to discover how light, silhouette, scale, and movement can communicate feeling and meaning. Then move into a Memory in Motion Kickoff where teams examine photographs, artifacts, and short bilingual audio clips from local histories or community stories, using sentence frames to discuss which moments could become characters, conflicts, and themes. Invite a museum educator, bilingual volunteer, or English support teacher to share a brief story snippet and model key vocabulary, then have students create quick freeze-frames, soundscapes, and improvised shadow scenes in response. Close with a whole-group debrief that introduces the driving question and asks students to identify one real experience from their lives or community that could become a shadow theater piece that matters to others.

End with a Shadow Lantern Premiere Night where students perform bilingual shadow puppet scenes for families, museum partners, bilingual volunteers, and community guests, then answer brief audience questions about the real stories, artifacts, and interviews that shaped their work. Pair the performance with a Behind the Screen Showcase featuring scripts, translucent puppets, prop sketches, rehearsal photos, and story-to-stage journals so visitors can see evidence of revision, collaboration, English-language growth, and historical research. If the space allows, structure the event as a Living Stories Festival with rotating performance stations and a Community Story Stage so all groups can present, receive feedback, and celebrate their learning publicly.