Forward and Backward

By Loudon dodd (Own work) [GFDL CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

The start of a new calendar year is a traditional time of reflection and planning. (After all January is named for Janus, the two-faced Roman god of transitions who looks both forward and backward.) No grand resolutions here, but I have done some significant planning for the spring semester. I revamped my writing schedule in an effort to finally finish transcribing interview data and begin writing the dissertation. I will complete this project in 2015; hopefully it can be sooner than later.

I am also teaching a methods course at Manhattanville titled “Theatre Education: Grades 7-12”. This is my second time teaching this class and I’ve significantly restructured the syllabus and added a great new textbook: Joan Lazarus’ 2nd edition of Signs of Change: New Directions in Theatre Education. At our first meeting we discussed our experiences in the “best” and “worst” classes as students and as teachers and what factors help and hurt our teaching and learning experiences. The class told me they appreciated that I participated in some of the activities as it provided them, as students, with some level of comfort and encouragement. Something sort of in the vein of “I won’t ask you to do anything I won’t do”. With that in mind, I will try to continue that example by writing a class reflection each week just as I’ve asked the students to do.

The first week’s reflection also came with the directive to draft a sample teaching philosophy. The class told me they were hesitant to write their statements because that term “philosophy” had the feel of something to be carved in stone. Or as one student put it, something that she would “print and laminate and put on my desk.” I assured them that the statement would be – should be – fluid and shift as they learn more in the semester and in their careers. That said, I’ve had some difficulty trying to boil my page-long teaching statement down to a more palatable paragraph-length philosophy. I will keep working on it and share it in the weeks ahead.

In the meantime, we will shift our attention to the Discipline-Based Theatre Education (DBTE) model of instruction that Lazarus discusses in Chapter 4. In this model, students explore a play from eight different roles and four modes of inquiry. We will use an excerpt of Fashion by Anna Cora Mowatt to explore some of this. I’m particularly excited to use this 170 year old play to see how it resonates and to start the discussion about what an “appropriate” play for this age group might be.