Category: Teaching

• September 2, 2016

  Further Thoughts on Creating a Productive Class-Rehearsal Room

  By virtue of the fact that, at many colleges, students can earn credit by being in theater productions, academia has cultivated a strange, liminal space that is both a classroom and a rehearsal room. I’ve been hired a number of times to direct students in a production, teaching them as I go what is expected of…
• August 26, 2016

  A Safe Space to Be Unsafe

  The University of Chicago made news by telling its incoming students not to expect trigger warnings or safe spaces, and not to bother petitioning the administration to disinvite problematic speakers. Responses have varied from “good for them!” to “how authoritarian!” In between sweeping bans on a major component of campus culture and the sweeping fear…
• March 25, 2013

  Feminism, the Internet, and the Imagination

  To think it thinkable shortcuts no work and shields one from no responsibility. Quite the contrary, it may be a necessary prerequisite to assuming responsibility, and it invites the honorable work of radical imagination. — “On Being White,” by Marilyn Frye This paper was originally presented as part of WAM! LA’s 2013 Conference. 30 years…
• October 17, 2012

  doing feminism in the rehearsal room and the classroom

  How lucky am I? As a feminist theater director, I seek out plays written by women about women. They are, statistically speaking, more likely to be feminist and on the whole they provide more opportunities for women actors. But one of the benefits of having an established reputation for doing a certain kind of theater…
• August 14, 2012

  pedagogy of the non-oppressed

  Since I rediscovered and posted one of my favorite bell hooks quotes the other day, I have been thinking about whether her pedagogy or any of those based on Paulo Freire‘s Pedagogy of the Oppressed are actually relevant to teaching today’s American college students. I asked this question once before, when at Marlboro College I…
• August 10, 2012

  this is what I have to say about that

  Early on, it was Friere’s insistence that education could be the practice of freedom that encouraged me to create strategies for what he called “conscientization” in the classroom. Translating that term to critical awareness and engagement, I entered classrooms with the conviction that it was crucial for me and every other student to be an…