In his more than 20 years at the school he has helped hundreds of students discover their love for theater and taught them the team work that goes behind producing a high school musical.
Phil Anderson, theater teacher at Roncalli High School, teaches 100 students daily in theater classes and directs about 120 students in Roncalli’s plays and musicals annually and hopes that by teaching theater, he is helping his students become more well rounded thinkers.
Anderson recently won the Indiana Thespian Hall of Fame Theatre Educator Award at the Indiana State Thespian Conference in January.
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Educators eligible for the award must have taught for 20 years and be nominated. Roncalli’s 2018-19 Thespian Troupe nominated their teacher.
He has spent all of his 21-year teaching career at Roncalli High School, where he has directed dozens of musicals and plays for high school students and teaches a theater curriculum that allows students to get a peek at nearly every aspect of theater from acting, technical elements and what it takes to produce a full theater show.
In college at Anderson University, he worked with a Christian artists group and fulfilled technical roles in theater productions. He also participated in theater productions at Franklin Central High School as a teenager, which helped cement his love for theater.
“I just really loved it, it was something I wanted to do early on and just kind of stuck with it,” he said.
He then thought he could help inspire and help young people by teaching them and chose to be a theater teacher.
“I just had a passion for teaching and a passion with working for young adults, but just helping them,” he said.”I just really enjoyed that part of it.”
Not every student he teaches in the theater arts will carve out a career in theater. But Anderson knows that any student can benefit from the skills that they are likely to learn in one of his classes or in acting on stage or working in a technical capacity, he said.
Each student who attends Roncalli High School must get two performing arts credits to graduate. Some take band and choir and others choose to enroll in one of the five classes Anderson teaches through out the day.
“Students who are involved in the arts are typically your higher level thinkers, they can use both side of the brain at the same time,” he said. “We are helping them hone these skills to think outside the box and that level of thinking.”
And he feels blessed to be able to teach a full theater curriculum, with Roncalli offering full theater classes rare for Indiana high schools, he said.
He hopes that students who take one of his classes or audition for one of his shows will see growth by learning about theater, Anderson said.
“Being able to put on a production and all the things that go into beyond what the audience sees, it is satisfying, it is rewarding, it is a unique experience,” he said.
