Arizona Theatre Matters Education
Study Guides & Toolkits
Two different ways to explore what a work opens—and carry that inquiry into practice.
Two ways to go further
Arizona Theatre Matters creates both Study Guides and Toolkits for our work. They are related, but they are not interchangeable.
We create both because understanding and action are different things, and each deserves its own space.
What is a Study Guide?
A Study Guide is an invitation to look more closely.
It provides context for a play, performance, or project: the history behind it, the ideas it raises, the people and events connected to it, and questions that can open further inquiry.
A Study Guide might include:
- Historical and cultural context
- Background on the work and its creation
- Themes and ideas worth exploring
- Primary-source materials and further reading
- Questions for reflection and discussion
- Connections to other disciplines, events, or works
You do not need to be a student or teacher to use one. Our Study Guides are for anyone who wants to spend more time with the questions a work raises.
They give you more with which to wonder about it.
What is a Toolkit?
A Toolkit begins in a different place.
Instead of asking, “What can I understand?” it asks, “What can I do?”
Toolkits contain practical resources that can be adapted and used by artists, educators, organizations, facilitators, communities, and individuals.
A Toolkit might include:
- Exercises and activities
- Discussion and facilitation methods
- Planning resources
- Templates and worksheets
- Practices that can be adapted for different settings
- Resources for making artistic and community work more accessible
- Ideas for experimentation and further creation
Take what is useful. Adapt it. Combine it with something else. Try it differently. Discover what happens.
Explore All Toolkits →Why do we need both?
Because learning about something and knowing what to do with it are not the same thing.
A Study Guide can deepen your encounter with a work. It can complicate an assumption, uncover a history, introduce another perspective, or leave you with a better question than the one you started with.
A Toolkit carries that inquiry into practice.
The Study Guide says:
Look again.
The Toolkit says:
Now try something.
One creates context. The other creates possibility.
Together, they allow the work to continue beyond the performance, beyond the classroom, and beyond Arizona Theatre Matters.
They are free. Use them.
Our Study Guides and Toolkits are created as public resources and are available free of charge.
Read them alone. Bring them into a classroom. Use them in rehearsal. Share them with a group. Build a conversation around them. Borrow an exercise. Question an assumption. Adapt a tool. Follow a source somewhere we didn’t anticipate.
The performance may end.
The inquiry doesn’t have to.