Nearing the finale of her college days at Southwestern University, theatre major Ana Perea questioned "how all of my passion and enthusiasm in theatre and women's studies would translate into how I spent my days paying my bills." Ultimately, she decided not to pursue an acting career but was left wondering what perfect role awaited her.

Perea has found her off-stage calling as the theatre program facilitator for Austin's American Institute for Learning (AIL) and the Cultural Warriors theatre troupe. AIL works with 16- to 21-year-olds who have had difficulty succeeding in the public school system or who have given up and dropped out.

As a year-round, open enrollment charter school, AIL confers high school diplomas in addition to offering GEDs. Perea says the non-traditional teaching methods employed at AIL focus on project-based learning. Classes generally include about 12 students. Aside from theatre, AIL offers construction, environmental, multimedia, computer and business programs.

"In theatre classes the emphasis is on performance and writing, but it's very different from what you might envision or from what people have experienced in a high school drama class," Perea explains. "My curriculum is more of a set of guidelines for me, in that I know that anybody who comes to this class needs to leave with these skills: working in a team, communicating, showing up, being on time, creative writing, basic performance skills and diction, projection, using the body. Other than that, I really follow the group."

She adds, "One group might come in and they all want to perform and they will write a play together and perform it for a public audience. One of my classes right now, their final project has been to teach class because they were complaining a lot about class. So we started off with some performances around what class has been like, and they had me play the teacher and they each would play sort of an extreme version of a student. Then we talked about it: what does class go like, and what is it for, and why are we here? And so they decided that they wanted their project to be for each of them to be teacher for a day.

"It's my job to help them have some ownership and help guide the direction of the class, but also to help them learn what they need to learn. In creating these projects, they've all had to work on their performance skills as they perform teacher roles, and they've been doing a lot of writing, some research, and they've been editing each other's work. It's going to end in a performative act that is really unique to that group of students, and they'll still get all of the skills that they need and the credit, but they've shaped it."

As for grading, Perea said, "I do a lot of self-evaluation with students. Mainly what I use is completion of the project: did you do it? how did you feel about how you did it? how well did you do it? how much better could you have done it?"

She says the Cultural Warriors program models itself after a professional acting troupe and involves AIL students who want to do more in theatre. They meet three times a week, write performance pieces based on their own personal experiences, present their performances in public and get paid for their work.

"My title is facilitator and that's really pretty accurate," Perea explained. "I just facilitate their having access to each other and access to knowledge that no one gave them before. It feels good to be able to remind people that they are good and intelligent, especially people who have had that beaten out of them."

Perea says that the opportunity has helped her grow, and she finds she is applying skills she developed at Southwestern.

"I'm working with people that need and appreciate what I can do," she says. "When I started here I had an altruistic sense about what I was doing, that I was going to be helping and giving and doing this kind of holy thing. The longer I'm here, the more I realize that we are all gifts to each other, learning and exploring with one another. Most of what happens here is about the students being in a place, finally, where they are given space to be the brilliant people and artists that they are, and I get to watch."