DUE JUNE 1, 2017.
Call for Proposals for Working Session:
The Pedagogy of Extraordinary Bodies: Re-Interrogating the Theatre History Syllabus
Michelle Liu Carriger, UCLA
Jessica Brater, Montclair State University
At a moment when democratic and diverse bodies are exposed to extraordinary danger, who and what we put on our syllabi, our ability to create safe and brave spaces in which to carry on open conversations, and our commitment training teachers prepared to organize and lead these classes take on a new importance. The university theatre history curriculum may be the most common academic sequence in US theatre departments; a large proportion of ASTR’s membership are likely responsible for classes like these in both tenure-track and precarious teaching positions. The challenges with building a strong, diverse, and balanced theatre history curriculum are myriad: lingering Euro- and Anglo-centrism in textbooks and curricula (with concomitant tokenization of non-Western topics as colorful addenda), the burden of exposing students to traditionally canonical texts while making space for women and other canonically marginalized artists, the impossibility of any one instructor developing expertise in the wide swath of world performance history given constraints on time and effort such as adjunct remuneration and balancing research and other teaching responsibilities. This working group seeks to (re)interrogate and (re)assemble our syllabi and in our theater history classrooms, exploring new modes in which to create prodcutive “spaces of discomfort” to speak and learn about difference and otherness with each other and with our students. We are fundamentally concerned with how we incorporate diverse bodies, broadly construed, into our discipline, across the divisions of rank amongst the professoriate, graduate and undergraduate education.
In this working group, we propose to bring together academics who teach theatre history from a variety of positions (tenured, tenure-track, adjunct, and graduate student) at a variety of types of institutions with a variety of approaches in order to work together to share and improve our methods of decolonizing, expanding, and energizing the typical theatre history curriculum. This working group engages with the 2017 conference theme in focusing specifically on how we can incorporate and present the widest variety of theatre and performance’s “extraordinary bodies” to a diverse contingent of students with sensitivity and confidence.
The working group will be organized into subgroups of cross-generational participants working at similar institutions, who will precirculate position papers, syllabi, and/or lesson and assignment plans amongst each other. In the working session itself in Atlanta, the pre-assigned small groups will collaborate to present summaries of their work to the assembled group and then we will break out into discussion group/task forces on the key concerns of the group (like effective strategies for training and supporting adjunct and grad student instructors without unduly burdening them, building diverse and effective collections of teaching materials—in all media formats–in conjunction with colleagues and libraries, and working with different types of classes from large lecture to small seminars). The long term goals of this working group include building a database of lesson plans, syllabi, and teacher-training materials; a special journal issue on pedagogy; and perhaps even a new theater and performance history textbook.
To apply to join us in Atlanta, we welcome proposals describing either the specific pedagogical problems you’re interested in approaching, descriptions of innovations you have already experimented with, or other aspects of your own pedagogical concerns with theatre history.
For any specific questions, please contact the working group convenors at mcarriger@tft.ucla.edu, and braterj@mail.montclair.edu.
Michelle Liu Carriger, PhD
assistant professor, Critical Studies
School of Theater, Film & Television
University of California, Los Angeles
mcarriger@tft.ucla.edu