Dan Kelin, Drama Educator

I have known Dan for decades. As Director of Drama Education for the Honolulu Theatre for Youth, he hooked my daughter into attending Saturday youth playwriting classes when she was in 8th grade. She was involved in that program throughout high school, and it contributed greatly to her development. Somehow he knew that I wrote plays too, so he told my daughter about a playwriting group that was starting by the new, at the time, artistic director. I had not written for a while, and it got me back into it. This is only to say - we go way back, including as a visiting teacher in schools where I have taught. The impact he had on my daughter and me is a sliver of how he has influenced students all over the world. He has been a Fulbright scholar in India twice. It is hard to summarize all his accomplishments (author, storyteller, playwright, actor, etc.), so a story will need to serve as shorthand. I had a student who had just arrived from the Marshall Islands. He could barely speak English, and was very shy, but he became the star of the show in the drama workshop that Dan taught at my school. I saw this student years later, and he was brimming with confidence, and still talking about how much he appreciated the drama workshop. The work that Dan does with these students is magic. It is pedagogy at its best. They learn language in an organic way, through action and context. I have used his book, In Their Own Words, in my own teaching.