Hey everybody! Katherine here. For those that don't know me, I'm the design teacher and the managing director here at PTI. I'm writing this blog post to keep everyone updated on the big news, which is that we can't wait to tell you all about our amazing new summer camp programming at West Chester University, launching Summer 2018!
There are other places on the website that will tell you who we are, and what we're all about, but I figured it might be nice to tell you why we decided to bring PTI into existence. In short, Pennsylvania Theatre Institute at WCU is an opportunity that we simply couldn't pass up.
(Who's "we"? Oh, that's myself, Charlie, Rob, and Liz. We're four teachers and friends who learned several years ago that we make an awesome team. We're all good performers and theatre artists, but we're also really great teachers, and we care a lot about the work that we do in our classrooms. We're also better at teaching theatre games than we are at taking selfies.)
We worked together for years at a summer camp that we loved, teaching kids that we adored. It felt like such an honor to watch them grow up, year after year, and while we all love our careers in the professional theatre world, we each looked forward to this job all year long. Charlie D, our camp director, is a good friend... but he's an even better boss. He spends an insane amount of time and energy making camp a special place, and we all benefit as a result.
When we learned that West Chester University was interested in starting a summer camp program and they wanted Charlie to run it.... well, we all jumped on board when he called. We just couldn't imagine spending our summers with anyone else, doing anything other than teaching students together. We definitely feel bittersweet about saying goodbye to our last camp -- it was a really special place, with incredible colleagues, students, and friends -- but we also knew this was a big opportunity. While our last camp was deeply special to all of us, we know that we're going to make something wonderful in our brand-new home.
One of the biggest things we're excited about is developing our Pre-College Intensive program. For years, we've been building curriculums in exciting ways with our younger students, and now we have the opportunity to dive deeper into more intensive exploration with our teens.
For our younger campers, we're so pumped to test out new ideas with new students. Some of our lesson plans have been honed to perfection over the years, but we've also come up with great new ideas for how to make our Young Company camp unique.
We'll try to keep this blog updated as we leap into the unknown with this project. In the meantime, wishing all a safe and happy holiday. (And hey! If you're so inclined, feel free to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter! We will try to keep it fun, or as fun as we can muster without the students on campus yet).
Love,
Katherine