Toward the Activist Classroom

Abstract

Toward the Activist Classroom Kim Solga In the spring of 2005 I spent several months in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin. I was there to be a part of an innovative PhD stream called "Performance as a Public Practice." My colleagues and I worked closely with extraordinary, socially engaged practitioners. We made work of our own and we talked again and again about how, when, and where theatre becomes a force for political and cultural change and when, where, and how it does not. When I returned to Canada to take up my first full time teaching job in September that year, I was full of the theories and practices I had absorbed at UT and determined to implement the ethos of Performance as a Public Practice in my own teaching. My new job was in an English department, in which students were accustomed to calling plays "novels." I knew immediately that by demanding the students learn by doing—by performing, embodying, making personal the very political work we would read together—I could help them to see theatre's potent public strengths. We began (in the wake of Hurricane Katrina) with a simple exercise: what if you were a theatre artist in Houston, in Baton Rouge, or in Nashville, I asked them; how would you muster your resources to help the people of New Orleans? I was amazed at the eager, smart responses—something that continued each week thereafter as students, divided into teams for the term, made outstanding poor theatre and spoke with sensitivity about what they and their peers were accomplishing, for whom, and whether or not it mattered. We were on our way. Six years on, I am now a decorated teacher at my school, something that makes me proud but also makes me laugh. After all, I'm not doing anything that my peers in theatre and drama departments across North America aren't doing; I'm just a queer [End Page 3] presence on a campus where "Theatre" no longer formally exists. I've always known that my students and I do good work, but I've also always known that we're not special. I've been wanting to tap into the teaching and learning knowledge of my fellow theatre and performance teachers for a long time; this issue has grown from my hunger to know not just how my work fits in, but how it could be better, stronger, for the help, advice, and encouraging war stories of my peers. What makes us good teachers? What makes our classrooms collaborative learning spaces? What makes our classrooms safe spaces to try out unsafe ideas? What makes our classrooms places where large-scale change can, in tiny steps, appear to begin? What makes our teaching activist, anyway? How do we—teachers and students—define that term for ourselves? My activist classroom is constantly evolving, and it will be so much richer for my experience of putting this issue of CTR together. For those looking for concrete suggestions to improve their teaching, Julia Lane, James McKinnon, Grahame Renyk, and Jenn Stephenson offer exercises that can be transported straight from these pages into the classroom. Lane considers the natural weave between improv performance and environmental education, and provides simple, excellent exercises from a recent workshop. McKinnon asks us to consider the creativity required to produce a good adaptation, and to use that creativity to help students rethink their capacity to be producers of "real" art. Renyk and Stephenson introduce us to the ICE technique and its capacity to enliven both assessment and assignment design. Learning to teach better isn't just about absorbing new techniques, of course; it's also about listening to the stories that mark us as teachers, for better or worse. Some classroom struggles can seem intractable, and those of us who fight for sexual, racial, and gendered social justice each day know all too well how hard bridging the divide between activist life choices and activist teaching choices can be. Natalie Alvarez and Stephen Johnson both teach the history of blackface performance. They stage here a conversation about the challenges of that work and...