The second season of UW–Madison faculty member Erica Halverson’s podcast, “Art Educators Save the World,” has concluded with an episode featuring three-time Emmy Award-winning actor Bradley Whitford — who got his start in acting while a student at Madison East High School.
Halverson, a professor with the School of Education’s Department of Curriculum and Instruction, launched her podcast in August 2022. Throughout two seasons, she has hosted many successful artists who talk with Halverson alongside their teachers and mentors about how those collaborations made them who they are today.
In the episode with Whitford — well known for his work on “The West Wing,” “Transparent,” and “The Handmaid’s Tale” — he discusses his early experiences in the theater program at Madison East High School, and later at Wesleyan University. Alongside him speaks Paul Milisch, who currently runs Madison East’s theater program.
Whitford and Milisch also ponder a fundamental question about students’ access to the arts: “Are we expanding opportunity, or are we preserving privilege?”
Whitford speaks on the importance of arts education for children — for him, he says, “It was a way for me to discover how to be a human being” — and expresses his worry about the state of it today.
“There is such pressure on children now that I did not feel — this premature specialization,” Whitford says.
He says that the pressure kids feel today from parents, teachers, society, and themselves, is something he didn’t experience when he was a child in the 60s and 70s. He adds: “I am so grateful; I would not have had the ownership, the identity, if it were something that had been imposed on me.”
Listen to the full episode, featuring award-winning actor Bradley Whitford and Madison theater educator Paul Milisch, here.
You can also read more about it in the Wisconsin State Journal article, “Homegrown celebrity Bradley Whitford salutes arts educators on UW–Madison professor’s podcast.”