About Cody Cosmic
I grew up in a small house in a big field outside of Amarillo, Texas. This was a great place to be as noisy as I liked. Growing up, my favorite thing in the world was to listen to stories and then act them out. I put on shows all the time for my patient mom. Since that time, I’ve completed undergraduate and graduate work in drama. I’ve led drama education programs for theaters and schools. And nothing has really changed.
My graduate work was in dramatic criticism, a sort of literary criticism. Northwestern University offers wonderful programs for those of us who can’t get enough stories. While there, I was introduced to several thought leaders in a type of drama for early childhood education called “creative drama.” I’d never heard of this, but it sounded great.
My methods in teaching creative drama are founded in the ideas of Winifred Ward. She worked diligently years ago to codify the ways that children understand and process stories emotionally, intellectually, and kinesthetically. She found that much of the heavy lifting for emotional and social intelligence takes place at the early learning stages. What I learned is something that, in a way, I always knew: creative drama can be a profound benefit to those who find it either through their schools or their own ways of playing.
I’m so lucky that, all these years after making all that noise growing up, I can teach new generations of kids how to learn about themselves and their world through drama.