Gersom de Koning on The Relationship Between Theater Education and Gamification

On this episode of the Getting Smart Podcast, Mason Pashia sits down with Gersom de Koning to explore theater education as a transformative practice. Their conversation examines how drama builds confidence, collaboration, leadership, and transferable skills while also offering a powerful model for gamification, exploration, and learning through productive failure. From arts integration and technical theater to the future of live performance in an AI world, this episode highlights why theater belongs at the center of meaningful learning.

Outline

• (0:00) Introduction & Background
• (2:01) Gersom’s Journey into Theater
• (5:41) What Makes Great Theater Education
• (13:40) Drama, Gamification & Learning
• (26:03) Failure, Collaboration & Leadership
• (40:32) The Future of Theater & Drama Education

Introduction & Background

Mason Pashia: You’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast. I’m Mason Pashia. For those who know me or Getting Smart or have seen my background on many Zoom calls in the past, I always have a row of guitars hanging. I moved into a new house, so I do not have them behind me, but they are, like, right here. So I am very passionate about the arts, particularly arts education, and it’s something that we don’t necessarily have the luxury or privilege of in many schools across the United States.

This picture looks a little bit different internationally, depending on where you are. You can have more or less access. But it’s something that is so critical, and it is such a good example of what high-quality, powerful learning looks like in a setting. Tom Vander Ark from Getting Smart previously has said things like, “There is nothing like demonstrating mastery in a performing art to show the rapid iteration cycle of improvement,” where you start with a musical piece or a play knowing nothing.

You’ve never read a word of it. You’ve never seen a note of it. And in a few weeks, you can perform it almost perfectly. And it is such a unique environment for building skill, demonstrating skill, and, my favorite part of it, doing it in a collaborative environment. So today I’m super excited to be joined by someone who is an expert in these things and to learn from them and with them along the way.

Today I am joined by Gersom de Koning, and they are a forthcoming educator at the United World College in the theater department, and also previously an educator, composer, and writer with extensive international education experience. So Gersom, thank you so much for joining me today.

Gersom de Koning: Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Mason Pashia: You bet. You’re joining from hot, hot Europe. If anyone hears, like, a box fan in the background, that’s what that is.

Gersom de Koning: That’s what that is. It’s cooling me down.

Mason Pashia: That is great. Well, stay cool. Thanks for keeping the meeting. I wanted to start with a kind of general question, sort of a softball, but

Gersom’s Journey into Theater

Mason Pashia: How did you find your way into the theater arts? And what made it feel like, “You know what? This is my thing”?

Gersom de Koning: Yeah. Well, when I was a kid, I was more actually leaning towards music. So I was in bands, et cetera, et cetera. And then I thought to myself, “Oh, maybe I’ll do something in music.” But actually my teachers were the ones who said, “Hey, you often are a frontman in the band. That’s because you can act well.” And so they kind of recruited me into first small plays, skits, and things like that. Then eventually I got into the high school theater arts program. We had a very, very amazing kind of Renaissance man teacher who, I think he was from the States back in…

I think he was from Georgia. He had a real estate business, and then he was also a teacher abroad, which was just amazing. And then he basically built this theater at… when our school moved, he had the theater built. He’s the one who designed it and everything. And then he said to me, “You need to join theater arts class, and you need to start taking this talent of yours more seriously.” But at the time, I was still in between, did I want to teach history or maybe English or maybe music, right? And it wasn’t until probably my junior or senior year of this theater class that I had underclassmen saying to me, “Hey, you’re like a teacher to me when it comes to performing arts.” And I think that was the first moment it started to click in. Then I went to the Netherlands for studying because I’m Dutch. And so I joined a program here, which is… it’s kind of called Arts and Community Development. That’s kind of the broad

Mason Pashia: Oh.

Gersom de Koning: they train you in. And so think of it as arts with a very social goal, right?

Gersom de Koning: Like it could be education, could be bringing old folks together to create art with them so that they stay young in their mind, all these cool things. So I joined that program. It was a four-year bachelor’s degree. And then through that, I started interning as a drama teacher. Every opportunity I got, it was either directing or backstage or whatever, anything, but it was always in educational institutions. And then after that, I moved to the UK, and that’s where I mastered in theater and then now also mastered in education. So I got two masters now. And so kind of that’s how I got into it. It’s a bit of a winding road through the arts and then eventually, “Okay, I definitely like this theater thing. I want to stick to that.”

Mason Pashia: Yeah. I love that. I remember there’s a movie called Inside Llewyn Davis from the Coen brothers that stars Oscar Isaac, and he’s a folk musician. And somebody was asking him, like, “How did you get good enough to play?” And he’s, “Oh, I wanted to be a musician first, but that industry is way too hard, so I became an actor.”

And I always think about that because obviously both are such impossible pipelines to a career in some ways, and it’s so funny that a lot of people actually do end up making that pivot where they’re like, “Acting somehow seems more stable.” It is actually a career that I can just inhabit for multiple decades and not like I have to reinvent myself every day like a musician.

So I really like that kind of traversing of the arts. I think that is also one thing that we actually don’t do a very good job of in arts education, is being like, arts is a posture as well as a skill set. And so how can you make that a transferable or a lateral skill rather than just saying, “I’m a painter and that’s all I’ll ever be”?

And we see it from the most successful artists where you dabble, like Joni Mitchell, who’s doing the album art for her work, doing this kind of composition stuff, writing beautiful poetry. It is this thing that has many branches. So it’s a useful place to explore as a young person.

What Makes Great Theater Education

Mason Pashia: I want to know specifically what goes into what you think is good theater education.

I think it is a really unique space for hands-on, rapid-feedback environments in a team, all these things that we talk about all the time as being powerful learning, but it’s so hard to manifest in

Gersom de Koning: Yes.

Mason Pashia: a classroom setting.

So what are the aspects that you think of?

Gersom de Koning: I think an important differentiation to state off the bat is there’s a difference between performing arts, like theater arts, and drama. So drama is much heavier on the process side. And I actually think any good theater program has a balance of both of these. From very young, it’s probably more drama-heavy, more process-heavy, and then as you get to high school, I think it becomes a little bit more of a 50/50 or sometimes a bit less on the process and a little bit more on the product side of it. So yeah, drama’s the process part, so it’s all about setting personal goals. So it can be personal development. It can also be educational goals so that you have, say, reinforcement of history class can be done through drama. So it could be that kind of process focus where our goal is to learn these things, we’re going to use the process of drama and dramatization to go about learning those things. And then you have the product side, which is much more like traditional theater arts classes where you have a production, and you work towards that production. And then the process part, so let’s say you do The Importance of Being Earnest, and you happen to learn about Oscar Wilde and that time period through the play. That is process, but it’s not as important as putting on the play, right? So that becomes maybe 10 to 20% of the whole production, is like, “Oh, yeah, you learned about these things, and you had other educational goals. They were met,” but they are kind of a byproduct. They’re not… The main goal was to perform, right?

And to get you on stage. So I think that differentiation is important to see, and I think, yeah, the younger we teach theater arts, I think the more important it should be to focus on the process part. I think the big mistake I see, and I forget which writer said it, there was a famous director and teacher who said, along the lines, I’m paraphrasing, “We spend a lot of time teaching children how we think they should act rather than teaching them to just act.” Right? To just freely express. And I think that can happen a lot, right? In elementary kind of age, they think, “Well, it’s a drama class. We better put on a little play.” So they put on whatever, a nativity play or something like that. But actually, kids aren’t very good at that, and that’s okay, right?

With dance or something that’s a little bit more, you know, you learn the steps and you do it, I think that’s okay, right? To do that. And with music as well, like you learn the proficiency of the basic instrumentation, and you perform that. But with drama, I think in the younger years, it’s excellent to just focus much more on the developmental side. So learning through play, adding other classes to kind of your drama program, what are you doing in there? And then as you move up through middle school, you get that awkward phase where kids are very unconfident. You have to try to use the drama a little more on the performative side to boost their confidence, right?

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Gersom de Koning: Then slowly, as you get towards high school, I think you can start putting them in front of people more and more, especially if they’re interested and they’re electing to do that class, right? I think elementary is more often… it’s not an elective, it’s a class that kids have to go to, and I think that’s an important differentiation as well. Anyway, and to loop back to your question of what is a successful program, I mean, in an ideal world, you’d have drama K4 to 12th grade, you know, with multiple teachers, one for the early years, one for middle school, and one for high school. And then I think in high school, and even middle school, I think it’s really nice to add an element of technical theater in there as well, because there are so many kids who gain massive, as you were talking about, transferable skills from technical theater, but also

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Gersom de Koning: confidence boosts from theater.

And that was one… before I started teaching technical theater, I didn’t think that that would be a byproduct. Personally, I was like, “Oh, well, they’re going to be backstage, and they’ll just learn their…” But the amount of confidence building I noticed from technical theater, they’re not even on stage,

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Gersom de Koning: I mean, mind-blowing to me.

I was so surprised after doing it that I was like, “Wow, this is just as confidence-building as these kids who are on stage.” Right? It’s a different type of confidence, but it’s still there.

Mason Pashia: Do you think that arts education at its best is integrated into every subject or as standalone courses? And it’s not fair to make it an either/or because there are obviously occasions for both, but that’s something that I’m always trying to figure out, is when we ask for arts funding, are we looking for more choirs and more theater departments, or are we looking for arts as an interpretive way of making meaning and meaning-making in every context?

Gersom de Koning: I think if I was talking to a principal who wanted to just boost their arts program in their school, generally speaking, I would say, “Hey, if you have capable staff,” which let’s be honest, teachers are very creative, capable people. Almost all the teachers I meet are very creative, capable people. If you give them the directive of, can you add some drama elements to your class, everyone… Maybe the math teachers might struggle, right? Because math is much more numerical, but even they might figure out ways to incorporate it. I think the element of having it in normal subjects is very achievable with the teachers you already have. So I actually think having an additional arts, like strong arts program alongside the learning that kind of weaves its way in and out of the main class, you know, maybe the drama teacher comes for a class one time, you know, an English class or a history class, and then does a little bit with them. I think that is stronger because I think there are obviously teachers who personality-wise don’t gravitate towards drama, but I think a lot of teachers are very capable and willing to learn if you were to just give them some PD, like basic PD on, hey, basic dramatic things you can do in your classroom. A lot of them would pick it up and be like, “Wow, this is working,” because it works, right? So I would say having both, right? As in the main classroom teacher just learns a bit about how to put drama into normal lessons, but you don’t need a specialist to come in and do that, and then you have the specialist able to focus on the arts stream and to build their department in a way kind of like athletics does, right?

Athletics, you often have an athletic director, and they kind of manage their team,

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Gersom de Koning: the athletics, towards a streamlined system, right? An overall system. I think the arts should have something like that too, where you kind of have a middle-management person, an arts director, who kind of goes, “Okay, I’m going to help make sure all the arts needs are being met, and I’m the one who can kind of negotiate with the on that.”

Mason Pashia: I want to dig into this a little bit with you because something that you brought to my attention is the way in which theater pretty naturally scaffolds into something else we’ve used as a lateral cross-subject learning device, which is gamification. It’s how do you make a lesson gamified?

How do you make learning gamified? And that feels like it’s actually been buzzy enough for long enough that people are like, “Oh, I just need to gamify this lesson.” But it’s not like, I need to dramatize this lesson. It’s not like, I need to make this lesson more personal, more expressed, like any of these things that we would associate with arts necessarily.

So I’m curious about, one,

Drama, Gamification & Learning

Mason Pashia: the connection between drama and gamification, and also what they can kind of learn from each other. How are they in conversation?

Gersom de Koning: Yeah. So, again, drama being the process-focused side of things, I started playing video games when I was very young, and then when I started teaching drama, and much more process-focused drama rather than performance- or product-focused, I was noticing, hold on, there’s this crazy amount of overlap between a good drama that you make with students, it can be about any topic, and a game that you do, like a video game that you play.

So I basically kind of used that as an impulse for my master’s in education to say, “Okay, is creative drama…” That’s what it’s called, right? It’s a process-focused, non-performative version of drama, right? So you’re acting, but it’s with each other, with the class. So you’re not going to perform this for anyone. The parents will never see it probably because it’s all in class,

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Gersom de Koning: and there’s… The thing about creative drama is, you know, the British say they invented it, the Americans say they invented it. Actually, nobody knows, right? I think it kind of happened. I think many people were doing it, and they didn’t write it down.

And then in the US, I think it was Winifred Ward, and in the UK it was Peter Slade, who roughly around the same time started doing this stuff with kids. And I started noticing this overlap of gamification elements or elements from video games I played and these dramas.

Mason Pashia: Hmm.

Gersom de Koning: And so I was like, “Is this a hunch, or is this factual?” So I found a periodic table of gamification. There’s a website for this. I found that out of 52 gamification elements, creative drama contains 37, and that was me asking other drama teachers and my own students in my own class, “How many of the elements do you recognize when we’re doing drama?”

Mason Pashia: Hmm. Can you give me an example of a few of them?

Gersom de Koning: So a few examples would be like, okay, they’re all set into different kind of categories, right? You have your general things such as investment. How do you get students invested in something, right? You can create a reward system, right? So that’s a gamification element. Another thing you could do is curiosity. How can you… in video games, you are encouraged to explore different areas of the map, right? So they grab you on your curiosity to find out what’s going on, and you can do the same in lesson design or through narrative. Those two are kind of connected, the narrative and curiosity elements.

So just as an example, I’ve done one where we actually have connected it to literature and history. So they’re studying Greek history in the IB school, and they’re also studying the story, literature of Theseus and the Minotaur. So we dramatized Theseus and the Minotaur, but all these kids were just random extra Greeks that were thrown under the boat, you know, with Theseus, and we would take turns maybe being Theseus. So to get them invested, first we talked a little bit about it. “Okay, what’s it like if you were randomly selected as tribute to this king and you know you’re going to die? There’s a Minotaur, right?” And they’re like, “Wait, there’s a Minotaur?” “Yeah, there’s a Minotaur.” Okay, so I get them invested, and then we have a narrative that starts to go, right? So yeah, these elements… the fact that I thought it was my hunch, but then my field research is proving the same thing, that over half the elements of gamification were already present in creative drama, and the only ones that weren’t tended to be ones that were harder to compute.

Like with a computer, it can think very fast and do calculations for you, right? And obviously if you’re in a live situation, it’s you, and that’s harder to do. So for example, a point system is a little bit harder to maintain if you’re doing drama, but a math teacher could probably manage that pretty well. Prizes, leaderboards, badges, those are all gamification elements that I found harder to put in drama. Or let’s see, social status or economy within the game you’ve created. These things are all possible to include. It’s just that I didn’t notice they were included as often, and my students didn’t flag them up as often.

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Gersom de Koning: Yeah, using these elements… and then when I was noticing, okay, this gamification is such a buzzword, people are talking to people in the gaming industry being like, “Hey, how can we do this in education?” And I was like, “Guys, you have a certified, basically, game designer in your school, your drama teacher, who’s probably been doing these elements since they started.” And yet they get passed over. They don’t get asked, you know, because their methods are unorthodox.

Mason Pashia: Yeah, right.

Gersom de Koning: And I just found that really funny. So that’s kind of why I wrote the paper, just to be like, “Let’s prove this. Is this a hunch or is this true?” And then seeing that it was true, I was like, “Okay, how can we encourage more teachers or administrative leaders to start interviewing their drama teachers?”

Mason Pashia: And drama has been probably the most long-standing form of human engagement, right? As the arts go, it goes back to the Greeks and previous oral histories. Oral storytelling has been the thing. So it is sort of funny to overlook that as a form of engagement in a school setting where you’re like, “Oh, well, duh.

This is actually how humans have essentially perpetuated civilization and at some level for so long.” I really like that idea of thinking of your drama teacher as a game designer. I think that’s really sticky, and people can think about that in kind of whatever context. But something you said I want to dig in a little more on,

Gersom de Koning: Yeah.

Mason Pashia: about this exploration element of both games and theater.

Something that strikes me as maybe distinct between the three kind of environments we’ve created, one is the theater environment or the drama, one is the games, and one is the classroom, is this idea of failure, which is kind of the other end of exploration. You explore, but that could result in risk or some kind of failure.

It seems really different in those three spaces, right? You have academic failure, which is sort of individually harming or sort of an individual setback. You have drama failure, which can feel like embarrassment or disappointment, but really you’ve kind of let everyone else down. It is a production of multiple people oftentimes.

Gersom de Koning: Exactly. Yep.

Mason Pashia: If you miss… if you don’t say your line, the next person typically cannot say theirs in… they have to improv. And you made their job harder. And then you have video game, where failure oftentimes is pretty minor. The stakes of failure, unless you’re playing a really brutal mode on Diablo or something and lose all of your items if you die late in the game,

it’s a pretty low risk. So how do you think about, I guess, failure in these environments, and what can the traditional school system actually learn about failure from drama and how sticky that is as a motivating factor?

Gersom de Koning: So, you’re right that in games, because you often get the chance to start again, there’s no failure in it. And I think that’s what my earlier statement about focusing more on drama process-based for younger years… that’s why it’s so important. It’s a scaffolding to be able to set them up to deal with a bigger failure in the future should they miss a line, right? And by not having them perform so much in the elementary years, I mean, they can do a performance or two, you know what I mean? Like a little bit, small things. But you basically set them up for success in most of these cases, right? And there’s often a teacher at the bottom who can prompt a line if necessary, and it’s still

Mason Pashia: You’re right.

Gersom de Koning: cute at that point. So when it comes to… if we’re going to say that the big stage failure, that would be upper years. I think you learn to deal with that as and when it comes, right? A good drama teacher will teach you how to improvise around bits and continue. But when it comes to classroom learning, the great element about exploration… and I think it’s a wider systemic issue that we tend to focus on examinations as a final way to prove your knowledge. And obviously not much… well, actually, things can be done about that, but that takes systemic change. But to start to view… let’s say we do a unit on the local ecology of your area, right? Number one, if you got the kids out of the classroom and actually exploring your microclimate, that’s huge exploration, and there are huge rewards. And if there’s failure in that, so let’s say a kid picks up a thing and is just, “Oh, it’s a frog. I found a frog.” And the teacher goes, “No, that’s a toad.” That is… unless the whole class laughs at the kid, even as a teacher, you can deal with that, right? You can go, “Oh, no, actually, you know, Johnny had a really good question. And here’s how you recognize what’s a toad and what’s a frog,”

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Gersom de Koning: so I think that’s where you can create exploration that’s very fail-safe, like pro-failure, basically.

Like you’re exploring and, a bit like a video game where you pick up items and you… a lot of chemistry in games is like you eat items to see what effects it has on you, right? To make potions. And so obviously kids can’t eat random stuff, but

Mason Pashia: But they do.

Gersom de Koning: yeah, exactly. But you can get them to start to think about, “Okay, well, how can we test these in different ways?” And a kickback I hear a lot from classroom teachers, like traditional classroom subjects, is they’re like, “Oh, all these things take so much time, blah, blah, blah, to do this kind of explorative learning.” And I like to point them out towards… look, there’s the Montessori method, which pretty much can do that all the way till 12th grade, and their students don’t turn out dumb.

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Gersom de Koning: They actually do very well in standardized testing. That kind of disproves the point already. And secondly, if you look at Jean Piaget’s constructivist methodology of learning, that’s actually an excellent way because you’re not prepping them for a written test in that setting. You’re prepping them for generalized thirst for learning and a general knowledge about the subject.

So you might have one kid who remembers exactly what amphibians… how to identify these amphibians in that ecology lesson. You might have another kid who’s obsessed with grass. Both of them have gained science skills and… instead… and they both learned about the local ecology. So approaching learning like that, and I think that’s where the drama approach to failure, where everything’s an experiment, and then you find out what works and what doesn’t,

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Gersom de Koning: goes for the drama classroom, right? We’ll read a text, and I’ll watch it, and I’ll be like, “Okay, but it didn’t work for me as an audience member.” And they’re like, “Well, it worked for me in my head.” I’m like, “Okay, let’s film you so you can see what you look like.” And then when they see themselves back, they’re like, “You’re right.

As an audience member, you got way less than I thought I had in my head.” And it’s the same concept of you try, okay, it doesn’t work, and you try again, and eventually you find something that does stick. Even, you know, some people say, “Well, that’s a lot of wasted time on trial and error,” but it’s not really wasted time because each journey of learning through that trying and failing, you actually learn different skill sets from each one of them, right?

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Gersom de Koning: So

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Gersom de Koning: that’s how I view the approach to failure. If you’re starting with very young ages, you scaffold it to make it not too painful when they fail. But when they get older, you can really start with experimentation that has bigger consequences, obviously safe ones, but that actually… like, “Okay, you guys, your rocket did not launch, okay?”

Mason Pashia: Yeah. Yeah.

Gersom de Koning: And then these students will remember that lesson for the rest of their life. But they’re not going to remember something you made them memorize on a piece of paper because they usually cram it the night before. Let’s be honest, right? Most students will cram unless they have a passionate interest in that subject.

Mason Pashia: And I have two places I want to go with this. So I’m going to bookmark one, which is

Failure, Collaboration & Leadership

Mason Pashia: taking those same lessons and applying them to leadership. But the one I want to click on real quick just before we round out this failure section… everything you said is great around exploration, and there’s a piece of that question that I want to open up, which is when you fail in a collaborative environment, there is a sense of accountability that really makes…

that is part of the reason you do well on a play, is so that it makes everybody else look good, and you’re proud of this thing you’re building together. Our education systems have done a really bad job of that, right? It is all individual success. And I think both schools view it as a bunch of individuals.

They don’t necessarily view it as, “Oh, our community is thriving because everybody has graduated successfully.” And students view it as kind of like a zero-sum game where they’re fighting everyone else out for college admissions, or they need to get the straight As for this job. So how can we make learning, the outcomes of learning, feel more collaborative and make people feel more accountable to each other, which to me is one of the most beautiful parts about team arts, right?

And even team sports have this idea.

Mason Pashia: In the arts, what can we learn from that part of collaboration?

Gersom de Koning: One big element that you were talking about… I worked in a US curriculum school in Bangkok. One big thing, especially when you’re in an American school in Asia, is grade inflation. It’s huge, right? And that’s kind of what creates this, like, “I need my GPA to be point-point-something higher

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Gersom de Koning: to beat so-and-so” to whatever college admissions thing. And then many college admissions actually admitted that they don’t care as much about the grades as they do about your personal letter or… right? Like these elements that make you a good person in their university. In the Netherlands, we grade really harsh compared to the US. So we have a 10-point system, so a 10 being 100, and if you get a 5.5… no, sorry, a 55, that’s already a pass, and most students aim for a 60. That means you pass pretty okay.

Mason Pashia: Interesting.

Gersom de Koning: And so it does have a… it’s not perfect, right? It does create a system sometimes where people will aim for mediocrity because they’re like, “Oh, it’s going to be graded harshly anyway.” But that being said, I don’t think it punishes people who try their best. Because if you get an 80 in the Netherlands, people are like, “Whoa, amazing.” You know? Like they do give you a pat on the back for doing extra well, and you can also negotiate the system to kind of get into honors classes, that kind of stuff. So one way is to fight grade inflation. I think that’s one element. The second element, the collaborative element you were talking about, is… so in my drama classes and tech classes, when I taught them, I said to everyone, largely, it’s a participation-based grade, and it’s a pass/fail. So if you don’t contribute, you just fail. Boom. Zero. If you kind of just scrape by, I’ll give you a passing grade, but it’ll be like a 66, just enough to pass you. And if you want a good grade, it will quickly jump to 100, like very fast, unless you’re trying to shirk on your duties if you’re a techie, right? If you’re trying to avoid duties, or if you’re maybe in drama, if you keep pulling other people in the class down with your comments, right? I might give you some warning grade, if that makes sense. But usually it’s pass/fail with me. And so in group settings, what it creates is it creates a system where if someone doesn’t contribute to the group, they have an accountability system where… right, it’s usually groups of only two or three because if you have four, it automatically has a freeloader, like almost guaranteed, right? Like group dynamics is just… two or three is just better. So if you have a group of three, let’s say, if someone’s the weakest link, I just… you have to create an atmosphere of trust in your classroom, but you can really create a system where students feel comfortable to tell you, “Hey, so-and-so’s slacking,” and then you can just go to that person and say, “Hey, I heard you’re slacking. I want you to pass. I’m on your team. Here’s what you need to do. Here’s how you need to step up your contribution to the class or to your group to get that, and then you’ll get 100.” Like, you know? And in that sense, it’s kind of like you’re rigging the grade inflation against itself, right? Because you’re saying, “Oh, now it’s a pass/fail, but a pass is 100,” right? And then occasionally I would have students here and there that had weird needs to get a few… like some points off, so maybe a B or something like that. But usually it was pretty solidly either you passed or you failed it. And I think that creates less individualism because people aren’t worried like, “Oh, will he take two points off if I said that one line a little too quietly?” If I’m like, “No, your personal goal was to be louder, and you were louder almost the entire time that your group performed. Those two lines, we can forgive that because you set out to achieve a goal and you achieved the goal,” right?

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Gersom de Koning: broadly speaking. And I think that makes it less about my individual grade and more about, “Hey, how can I make sure my group succeeds, and how can I contribute in a meaningful way?” And that’s when you change the tone to, “How am I contributing meaningfully?” You also find that they have much more individual learning interest to go along with it. You know, if you are in a drama class and you don’t have a tech class, for example, and you do have a kid who, let’s say, hates standing up on stage, and you give them the opportunity to do… like they’re interested in costumes or they’re interested in lighting, and you say to them, “Hey, that could be your contribution. And you do need some lines on stage because the rubric says it, or you do need to be on stage a certain amount of time. But if you have less lines than Jill because she loves performing and you’ve contributed to the lighting, I will still give you an A,” right? And then they’re like, “Wow, I made a meaningful contribution because of my own unique gifting or skill set.”

Mason Pashia: I always thought it’d be really interesting if we had, like in the States, you take something like a class almost everybody takes, like Algebra 1, and you say the only way to… basically, at some point you have to start, but then every year Algebra 1 is taught by the class, the grade that had it last, and every student has to teach three periods over the course of the year.

And so then at the end of the year, it’s so the ninth graders that just had Algebra 1 are teaching it now to the incoming Algebra 1 students, and if they pass, then that demonstrates mastery for both, and then they go up and then they teach the next year. Because it does… it makes this accountability where everybody in the class has to know what they’re talking about, and there’s this intergenerational mode.

There’s this experience of teaching. There’s this kind of peer mentorship thing, and it’s actually… there’d be something kind of cool if you actually chose a year like that, where in the States you’re often bridging schools, where it’s this kind of… there’s a familiarity or maybe this lack of stress because you’re getting to interface with some upperclassmen a little bit.

You have this kind of relationship. I don’t know. I haven’t seen that. I’ve seen a lot of peer mentoring structures, but I actually wonder what it would look like to have that be a demonstration of mastery for both people in the room, and then you kind of move it up in these

Gersom de Koning: In the school in Bangkok, I taught multilevel theater arts and multilevel technical theater. So you have year ones and year foursin the same block. There are frustrating elements to it. Like you as a teacher, especially on the tech side, you hover a lot and you’re going from group to group a lot, so it’s a lot of footwork.

Gersom de Koning: But in terms of demonstrating mastery and student initiative, it’s huge because by the time… if you get someone who goes all the way up to theater four or technical theater, I have many students who went off to college, and their first job that they got was by demonstrating that they’d learned skills in technical theater or by demonstrating leadership skills that they’d had in theater arts because they’d done some directing. They’d done… they’d helped me manage my scheduling or things like that. So some drama teachers are very, I guess, averse. They love their elite theater class of theater nerds. But I actually think, though that’s fun because you vibe with them, I actually think it’s better to mix up your levels. It gives them opportunity to reach down and kind of, like the algebra kids, help up the kids who are still learning and remember what it was like to start out. You know what I mean? And be nervous.

Mason Pashia: I love that. I want to get into that second aspect that we talked about earlier, which is for leaders specifically. I think famously good actors are best at listening in the same way that good jazz musicians have the best ear. It’s not necessarily about the best chops, it’s actually about being the most conversant on the stage or being the most present.

Mason Pashia: Now this is kind of a leading question, but feel free to address that part or not. I’m curious about how leadership, which is increasingly being asked to take risks, increasingly being asked to transform systems that feel uncomfortable or stuck or comfortable, or the systems feel comfortable, they feel uncomfortable changing it… what can those teams learn from the arts, dramatic arts, to actually help them on that journey of ushering in change and being more risk-tolerant as a collective group?

Gersom de Koning: Yep. First of all, I mean, you mentioned it earlier, the “yes, and” mentality from improv is excellent. In a nutshell, it is to not immediately say no to an idea but to just say, “Yes, and what?” And how are we going to implement this idea? So that’s one way I think leadership can definitely benefit. Now there are times when I think the administration has an overview maybe their arts department doesn’t or their teachers don’t, and that sometimes you can go, “Yes, I like your idea, but I’m worried about these elements. Can we iron this out first?” But you’re still approaching it with a yes instead of a, “No, that’s a bad idea.” So that’s number one. Secondly, I think… and this is the thing that I had in my writing, the final question I ended with was when we talk about gamification, I think more educational leaders need to look to their drama department and ask them, “What are you doing for gamification? Like how do you gamify your lessons?” And the drama teacher might not even realize they’re gamifying it because actually before, when I threw this out to the drama teachers I knew in a survey, they were like, “Oh, it’s called gamification?”

Mason Pashia: Interesting.

Gersom de Koning: They didn’t even think of it as gamification. They just…

Mason Pashia: Yeah, engagement might be the term that everybody kind of is…

Gersom de Koning: Yep, exactly.

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Gersom de Koning: Or they just said, “Oh, that’s just a good drama lesson.”

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Gersom de Koning: That’s it.

Mason Pashia: Right.

Gerseom de Koning: And I actually interviewed a guy from EA Games who did some big games, and when I described my classes to him, especially the creative drama aspect, he was also like, “Oh dude, you could work as a game developer with the kind of systems you’re thinking about.” So I think a lot of drama teachers have the skill set to build systems for gamification or gamifying lessons. I think it might be an untapped resource. And then the second one that I’ve noticed quite a bit… well, a lack of, rather… is I’ve been to many schools and I’ve asked drama teachers like, “Hey, do you ever give PD to your colleagues? Because you do peer PD, right? Do you ever do peer PD on presenting?” No. Nobody ever asks them. The most sassy drama teacher, you know, your stereotypical drama teacher who has a big personality… some don’t, right? But some you can see them coming from a mile off, and nobody’s asked them to do PD on speech delivery, voice health, vocal health. And it’s shocking because you’d think, you know, the choir teacher would get asked to do vocal health workshops, right? Especially if they’re knowledgeable about it, right? If they’re more of a band teacher who happens to teach choir, I can see why they might be uncomfortable, but if they do, right, just to give an example, I actually offered vocal health PD in one school I worked at twice, three times. Nobody signed up. And it’s because, A, obviously teachers are busy, right? But B, there were other PD offerings that seemed more trendy, AI or something like that. And yet at least one in 10 would lose their voice in the busiest times of the year, and here I was performing louder in a larger… we had a large theater. My last one was a 600-seater theater. I could perform in there with no mic and never lose my voice, you know? And yet it doesn’t click with people that, oh, hold on, the drama teachers have outsider drama skills, right?

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Gersom de Koning: They… and to a certain extent, it’s a little bit of the art department’s maybe own fault. We tend to be a little bit siloed off in the community.

Mason Pashia: For sure.

Gersom de Koning: But I think if administrative leaders were to reach out and say, “Hey, dude, please help your colleagues with this thing,” I think actually most drama teachers or performance teachers would be very thrilled. I think that’s a great way that leadership can also kind of give them a pat on the back of, “Hey, we see you and we see what you’re doing.” And it’s a small thing, and it’s actually very beneficial to the admin. It’s great PD, but it’s also a way to compliment them and be like, “We see the work you do and how it’s important to your colleagues as well.”

Mason Pashia: It’d be interesting to do that for something like professional services too, to be like, “Help each learner share the story of themselves in a way that is confident and believable,” and to have the drama teacher on the other side of that table rather than the CTE director, or both of them.

I think even better if you can make that interdisciplinary.

Gersom de Koning: Both would focus on different elements.

Mason Pashia: But yeah, it’s, “Tell me why you deserve this hypothetical job,” and then the student’s telling it, and you’re like, “Oh, you didn’t talk about this one experience you had,” from the CTE director, and the drama teacher is just, “Oh, these are actually some skills for making yourself more convincing to someone or something.”

Gersom de Koning: Exactly.

Mason Pashia: That’d be really valuable and, again, is an untapped resource likely in those conversations.

The Future of Theater & Drama Education

Mason Pashia: I want to zoom out a little bit from education. We’ve dug in pretty deep, and just talk broadly about drama because I am interested in your take on this. I personally feel like drama is a pretty fundamental human act, or fundamentally human act, rather.

And so I’m curious about your outlook on these kinds of careers going into an AI world where arts are bound to get disrupted.

Gersom de Koning: Yep.

Mason Pashia: Yeah, we’ll start there.

Gersom de Koning: Yeah. So interestingly, there was an article recently in The Guardian. UK drama is the least threatened by AI.

Mason Pashia: That’s how it feels. It seems like that would be true. You can’t get a bunch of… yeah.

Gersom de Koning: I can’t find the article right now, but it was pretty interesting. It was basically saying that of all the arts careers, they did these surveys with the audience, and the audience largely agreed that they didn’t want to see a hologram or a robot performing a human role. That was one. But that’s the acting side. Then they also have looked at the technical side. So obviously on the technical side, there are tools making technicians’ lives easier that are AI, let’s say AI-based. I actually don’t think they’re really AI. They’re just sticking that label on

Mason Pashia: Yeah, for sure.

Gersom de Koning: to make it cooler.

But they are, let’s say, intelligent lighting systems, for example. I actually think that if you go into the technical side of theater, you have a plethora of transferable skills, so you don’t… students that I know who’ve gone into that, I always tell them, “I don’t think you’re not going to have a job. I think you’re going to have a job. It just might not be immediately in drama, like a performance venue. It might be something else related or adjacent to it.” But another thing is… so the university I went to in England, University of Kent, has an 81 or 82% employment rate after the students graduate.So, and then of that 19% left, that percentage is still studying, they’re continuing studies. So in the end, it was a very small percentage that didn’t actually find jobs. And so I think especially at the K through 12 level, viewing drama not as, “Oh, it’s performance. Oh, it’s going to be an actor or director,” right? We have a very, let’s say, layman… like the general person only thinks of acting or directing as the two jobs that exist. But if you think of drama’s transferable skills, there are… I mean, first of all, one movie has thousands of people on it.

Mason Pashia: Oh my gosh. Every movie is a marvel to me. I can’t believe this got made. Yeah.

Gersom de Koning: And so, you know, that’s still in industry. If you’re talking industry-adjacent, there’s just so many

Mason Pashia: There’s so many, yeah.

Gersom de Koning: things that I think you can use drama as a skill for. My colleague who used to do dance choreography… so she also did dance, but she was an admissions officer, actually. And so the way she put it was like, “I use drama every single day because I have to pick up the phone in a nice voice. I have to pick up the phone and say, ‘I’m sorry, but very seriously, your child cannot be accepted this year. Their score wasn’t high enough.'” And she’s like, “Maintaining composure was 100% a drama skill,” because either way, whether happy or bad news, she has to maintain a composure and sound a certain way, right? And so I think educational leaders need to view drama more as a holistic skill set that’s part and parcel with all these other skills students are learning.

Mason Pashia: Right.

Gersom de Koning: Yeah.

Mason Pashia: Well, and you never know what’s going to pop up, right? Maybe theater was really big for a long time, but now esports is big. And it’s a pretty transferable skill set for how to run a live event. And the crowds are big, and the subject changes, and the tech stack changes, but you’re still…

But there’s just a lot of… even within a certain domain, if you stay linear, the world may be changing around you, but you’ll still have utility

Gersom de Koning: Yes.

Mason Pashia: in your experience. So yeah, I think it’s interesting. The last question is around building demand for theater, because I tend to agree. I think live music and theater are going to have a really big resurgence in about a year or two years when people are tired of not knowing what’s human and what’s not.

Gersom de Koning: Yes. Yeah.

Mason Pashia: But I think theater has done something that I think a lot of maybe the more high arts have done, which is created some distance between themselves and the general public.

I mean, we still see huge successes on Broadway, for example. But off-Broadway, you’re going if you’re college educated typically, if you really care about literature and film, in quotes.

Gersom de Koning: Yes.

Mason Pashia: So how can we make everyman theater again?

How can we make everyone feel complicit in the proliferation of the dramatic arts?

Gersom de Koning: Yeah. I think… so in Europe it’s very different. There’s a lot of funding for lots of types of theater.

Mason Pashia: That helps.

Gersom de Koning: That helps. But I actually also think people underestimate how cheap theater can be. Peter Brook says you just need an empty space and one actor walking across and one person watching, right? That’s all you need. So first of all, lowering the bar. And I think a part of that is a self-imposed thing. So drama teachers do this where they worry about ticket sales, so they do a big-name show from MTI or TRW, and they have to pay all these rights fees. I think maybe if you’re starting up your program, I can see why you’d do that to get a little bit of rapport with your community. But once you’ve got them in seats twice, you could write a show or devise a show, and parents will come because they’re supporting their child, right? If you make it about the community aspect, then it’s going to be fine. Like, you make it a fun community event, right? Have food, have drinks, have just a nice atmosphere, and then strip it down, like change it up a bit. That distance that we have is also from this idea of, “Oh, there’s the stage and here’s the audience.” You know, use classroom spaces, use the street, use a forest or a local park. Instead of making it into this big event,

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Gersom de Koning: make it into something that’s very approachable. A project I did was called Stories of the Stour, and the Stour is a river in Kent.

Mason Pashia: Okay.

Gersom de Koning: We worked with a school where these kids were from low-income backgrounds, so there’s almost no budget. But the principal was very happy to get them doing some drama. But a bunch of them couldn’t even show their faces publicly because of family history. And so we used masks, super cheap masks and costumes, to film them, and they made up their own myths based around this river. They were allowed to come watch. See, that’s a thing. So we still built their… It was part of a local festival. They couldn’t perform at the festival, some of them, but they could be filmed with a mask on and that film could be shown. And it was an amazing experience watching one of the girls come in. In my mind I was like, “She’s masked. How is this going to build her confidence, right?” I was worried, right? But as she came in with her caretaker, I think it was an aunt or something, the video came on, and she pointed at herself, and she’s like, “That’s me.

I made that.” And she was so proud. And that was in a tiny back room of

Mason Pashia: Mmhmm.

Gersom de Koning: a small church, you know, that had opened its doors for this festival, right? And it’s part of a huge festival. But her and I think there were 10 other people in the room, so tiny audience… her confidence from just those nine other people watching her. And I think when you connect it to your community in that way, right? Whether it’s through local myths or stories from your granddad’s time or whatever, you find ways to make the theater accessible to that demographic. I think that’s what will remove that distance. And then also, for administrators, I would say give your drama department a set budget per year and then allow them to…

Well, if you can’t… sometimes you can’t roll over the budget because of tax reasons, right? Schools have that. But if they do have ticket sales, allow them to have a money pot where their ticket sales do go into, so that they can slowly build up their gear or little things. And so, for example, at the last school I worked at, one year we earned a lot back in ticket sales.

We did Aladdin, which was very popular. Sold out three nights. And then the second show we did was A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which we did much more intimate, but we could still fit, I think, 90 to 100 people per showing. So we had this extra budget, and then my principal was great.

I asked him, “Hey, can I use that leftover budget we have?” Because we’ve now… we’ve spent some money, but we’ve also earned some money back. We have this much budget left per year. Can we use that to buy some… I think they were like $1,000 apiece spotlights, follow spots. And he was like, “Yeah, of course.” Right? Because his policy was, if you’ve got the budget left, why not use it to continue the drama program and keep it going? So by the time I left that school, we had bought… I mean, it’s in Thai baht, but it was millions of baht worth, right? Which is hundreds of thousands of US dollars’ worth of equipment over nine years of a little bit from shows, a little bit from our normal budget, you know?

Right. And allowing your teachers to have ownership, but also the students will get ownership of their gear. They’ll feel like, “We earned this.”

Mason Pashia: Yeah, that’s cool.

Gersom de Koning: I think they’ll respect it better. I think that’s a great way to kind of slow-grow, because a lot of people are worried about the costs of the arts. It’s a way to slowly grow your arts program over a period of four to five years rather than, “Man, we have to pay for a whole theater.” You know?

Mason Pashia: Yeah. No, that’s a great story to end on today. So

Gersom de Koning: Yeah.

Mason Pashia: Gersom, thanks so much for being here. Thanks for sharing what you’re up to. Where can people go to find out more about you or your programs or any of that?

Gersom de Koning: I have a website. Let me just… we can pause for a sec. I just want to make sure it works.

Mason Pashia: It does. I was there.

Gersom de Koning: Oh, cool. It’s gersomdekoning.com.

Mason Pashia: We’ll put a link in the show notes.

Gersom de Koning: Yes, you can find out more about me there. I have plays there as well. If you’re a theater educator watching, you can license my shows for way cheaper than MTI.

Just saying. Yeah, so yeah, I can be reached there, and if people want to have follow-up conversations, I’d be happy to have them. I am very much into reforming education, if that makes sense.

Mason Pashia: Oh, it makes sense. Thank you, Gersom.

Guest Bio

Gersom de Koning

Gersom de Koning believes theatre is a microcosm of the world: a space where people can safely explore what it means to be human. For him, theatre is not simply an art form, but an essential language for empathy, collaboration, and imagination. This belief has shaped his career and his commitment to placing theatre and the arts at the heart of education. Rather than treating the arts as an optional enrichment, Gersom sees them as a driving force for how people learn, connect, and create.

Born in Thailand to Dutch parents, Gersom grew up between cultures, countries, and stories. He has lived and worked across the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Singapore, and Thailand, directing more than 25 productions and teaching students from age 3 to 65. Whether leading a large-scale musical or an intimate devised production, he approaches each project as a laboratory for creativity, creating spaces where learners of all ages can discover their voices and explore big ideas together.

As a theatre educator, composer, and writer, Gersom is especially interested in the intersection of creativity, learning, and human development. His work has ranged from using technical expertise to modernize a 620-seat performing arts center to writing original works and reimagined classics such as 1984 and Down the Rabbit Hole. Across every project, his goal remains the same: to make creativity contagious.

Gersom is committed to amplifying the role of the arts in education and beyond. He believes arts education can help shape the next generation of creative thinkers, educators, and storytellers. In a world increasingly shaped by technology and artificial intelligence, he sees imagination, empathy, and artistry as the qualities that will keep us deeply and distinctly human.

Links

• LinkedIn
• Gersom de Koning Official Site
• Proper Job Gradcast Episode 19
• Creatively Christian: The Creative Power of Limitations