During Spring 2016 I facilitated one Honors Option in IAH 241D. During Fall 2016 I facilitated two Honors Options, one each in THR 110 and THR 332.
During calendar year 2016 I served on graduate committees for two MFA students in Design and two MFA students in Acting.
During Spring 2016 I taught an Independent Study on Theatre of the Absurd, enrolling four students and culminating in a showing of scenes including original work they wrote. This was excellent preparation for the Freshman Showcase on Absurdism in the fall.
I provided mentorship for student dramaturgs on productions of Grease, Punk Rock, The Tempest, and Blood at the Root.
Lifelong education overlaps with outreach and would include pre-show and post-show discussions (for Pride and Prejudice and Carnival of the Absurd); Friends of Theatre Scripts Class (for Pride and Prejudice); lecture on Shakespeare for East Lansing Women’s Club; CEU Workshop for high school teachers; and META Leadership event.
I mentored graduate student TAs for online courses THR 330 (Theatre in a Global Context) and THR 350 (Plays as Film). I served as a course administrator but did not teach these courses.
Spring 2016 was an unusual semester, as I was not teaching undergraduate Theatre majors except in an Independent Study course (and a small group who enrolled in the IAH class). The IAH SIRS are very similar to other semesters in the large IAH class. In leading the course last Spring, it was not possible to find a time for the full group of instructors to meet each week. The experiment of not meeting at all was a failure; the course felt disorganized and I think the mentoring of grad student TAs suffered. This semester we are experimenting with occasional meetings, rather than weekly meetings or no meetings. So far this strategy seems to be working better. I would like to note that “And Away We Go” was an ideal show to start the semester in IAH because of the theatre history focus.
I reworked THR 832 based on comments from the cohort of MFA students that I taught in 2013, and I think if I had had those students again it would have been perfect for them! But this group is different. One very successful innovation was starting off with essays on the pedagogy of play analysis. In future I hope to clarify the objectives of this course for students by continually focusing on issues of pedagogy and Theatre Studies curriculum. This comes partly in response to students not understanding why they are taking this course, and partly in response to the comments from U/RTA.
THR 332 in the Fall was a successful first iteration of the History and Theory of Comedy course. We spent too much time on Ancient Comedy, and I would significantly reduce this unit in a second go-round. I had modeled a Classical Comedy pitch project on the Greek Tragedy pitch project I use in THR 431, and I think this was not really the right route. We covered Superiority Theory, Relief Theory, and Incongruity Theory quickly at the beginning of the semester and regularly returned to that vocabulary for analyzing how comedy works. I’m baffled by the comment about not analyzing comedy; “Why is it funny?” was the first question I asked about every single thing we studied. But I do think moving from a chronological to a theoretical/mechanical organization of the course would be productive.
THR 110 SIRS are slightly weaker than usual. Based on conversations with the class at the end of the semester, I suspect that the main reason for this is the unit on Absurdism. I felt that this unit was necessary in order to generate content for the Freshman Showcase. Writing a short absurdist play replaced the poster design assignment, which is usually a popular assignment. More importantly, the Absurdism unit muddied the narrative of the course because I had to place it between Realism and Classical dramaturgies, so it didn’t fit stylistically or chronologically.