The review period includes facilitating one Honors Option, for a student in THR 431 during Spring 2017.
I have served on graduate committees for two MFA Acting students throughout their time in the MFA program. In Fall 2017 I joined committees for all design MFA students enrolled in THR 830. I continued on the committees for the first-year cohort. I also attended fall committee meetings for two MFA Acting students in lieu of a committee member who was on sabbatical.
I joined a doctoral dissertation committee for a student in the Department of English who intends to write a dissertation on Shakespeare in Performance.
I provided mentorship for student dramaturgs on several productions. I plan to develop a more formalized structure for mentoring student dramaturgs, as this is currently hit or miss. My collaboration with the student dramaturg on The Misanthrope was very successful; my supervision of student dramaturgs on The Great Gatsby and Thus with a Kiss I Die were less successful.
Lifelong education overlaps with outreach and would include pre-show and post-show discussions (for The Misanthrope); Friends of Theatre Scripts Class (for The Great Gatsby and The Misanthrope); and CEU Workshop (MSU Theatre Institute). I was also part of a bus trip to Detroit to see Dominique Morisseau’s play Skeleton Crew in conjunction with English and Citizen Scholars.
I continue to mentor graduate student TAs for online courses THR 100, THR 330, and THR 350. I serve as a course administrator but do not teach these courses. This mainly involves fielding a significant volume of emails about overrides at the beginning of the semester.
I taught IAH 241D in both Spring 2017 and Fall 2017. The Spring semester was a good iteration of the large group (300 students), with a collaborative teaching team that worked well together. Fall 2017 was the first iteration of a smaller course (100 students). This felt significantly more manageable. I tried to actualize goals from IAH (specifically citizenship) by including one reflective paper instead of a production. This made me feel I got to know the students better, and I think it was a more productive application of course concepts. But several students commented in SIRS that they would have preferred to write about three productions.
The Spring 2017 iteration of THR 431 was a good experience for me and for the students. Focusing on Intercultural and Postcolonial Theatre helped the course feel relevant to them. I worked with Max Evjen on an MSU Museum Performance project. Students enjoyed this project but some commented that they did not understand its role in the course. I’d like to incorporate this project again and try to work on making its purpose clearer to students. I have now developed several versions of THR 431 with individual modules that can be separated out, and I anticipate that the Spring 2019 version will include the Intercultural Theatre module and the Greek Tragedy module, pending finalization of season selection.
I revised THR 830 this fall to emphasize the focus on pedagogy and to develop new units on trends in theatre practice, notably Devised Theatre and Immersive Theatre. The most useful innovation in the course was requiring students to write critical journal assignments each week. Most of the students noted that practicing writing each week helped their writing to improve.