Personal Narratives:A Course Design for Introduction to Theatre Claire Syler (bio) Introduction At age 23 I taught my first Introduction to Theatre course. Nervously, I stood behind a lectern and thirty faces—a diverse group of ages, ethnicities, backgrounds, and majors—looked back at me. I began class by asking, "What is theatre?" Silence. More silence. Tentatively, one student said he had been in a high school play. A different student described a talent show. Finally, one student said she had seen plenty of movies, but did not know much about theatre, candidly offering, "I'm only taking this class to earn a 'gen ed' credit and the art and music options were full." Two minutes into the semester and I was floundering. Even though I asked the students a question (and they graciously replied), I was not prepared to understand—let alone make use of—their responses. To conceal my insecurities (or so I thought), I wrote our textbook's definition of theatre on the board and launched into a prepared lecture on the Greeks. In retrospect, I find it highly unlikely that my hasty transition and deference to the canon helped any student bridge a current, albeit limited understanding of theatre to a meaningful introductory experience with the discipline. Nearly a decade later, pedagogy is one of my greatest interests. Like so many others in our field, I use the classroom as a laboratory to examine the processes involved in learning in order to design an effective curriculum. For the past eight years, in particular, I have refined an Introduction to Theatre course design while teaching seventeen, semester-length Intro classes, ranging in size from five to seventy-five students. Throughout these experiences, I have come to believe that quality introductory theatre pedagogy should afford practice-based learning opportunities that lead students to take risks, reflect deeply, think critically, and imagine conceptually. In this regard, my perspective on theatre teaching is aligned with Paulo Freire's "problem-posing education," in which the problems of humans (in relationship to their world) are posed to students for the purpose of learning (79). To investigate such problems, students perform "acts of cognition" by engaging in dialogue and praxis (80)—the process of action and reflection (51). To apply this pedagogical perspective to Introduction to Theatre, I employ students' personal narratives—their writing and telling of an event that resulted in personal change—as the basis of the course design. In so doing, I eschew the premise that students should investigate only formal dramatic literature in an introductory theatre course. Additionally, I reject the implicit authority embedded in such texts' dramatic structures, genres, and historical and cultural perspectives. Rather, by introducing theatre through personal narratives, the students' diverse backgrounds and experiences (shaped by race, class, gender, and culture) are privileged and offer a wide array of legitimate dramatic texts worthy of examination, analysis, and envisioned theatrical production. For roughly half the semester, students apply theatre practices to their personal narratives. Through scaffolded learning opportunities, students are positioned to approximate key practices of professionals, such as: writing and refining a dramatic text; enacting a solo performance; conducting textual analysis; casting actors; developing a directorial vision; choosing a theatre space for staging; [End Page 173] and designing scenery, costumes, and sound. In so doing, students engage in the problems and procedures of professional theatre artists in a learning environment, which "stimulates teachers and students to become Subjects of the educational process" (86). The purpose of this essay is to share the current iteration of a course design for Introduction to Theatre. I begin by providing a rationale for the use of personal narratives in an introductory theatre course, which I ground theoretically in Freire's argument for problem-posing education. I then outline the design's two major units, citing specific classroom exercises and assignments. I conclude with a discussion of the course's successes and limitations. My goal is to provide instructors of Introduction to Theatre with an approach for teaching what is, perhaps, the most common of theatre courses. Rationale As one of the twentieth century's foremost educational theorists, Freire has had a significant influence on current educational theory and...
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Aug 1, 2016
Cherstin M Lyon 
