Teaching Theater Research Articles

The Gaza Monologues: Palestine, Representation, and Reciprocity

The Gaza Monologues Palestine, Representation, and Reciprocity Samer Al-Saber (bio), Jeanmarie Higgins (bio), Ryan J. Douglass (bio), Jeanmarie Higgins (bio), and Michael Schweikardt (bio) Introduction: What-Where is Prompt? Materiality in the Digital Space Prompt: A Journal of Theatre Theory, Practice, and Teaching is a generative space where theatre artists, educators, and scholars converge to exchange ideas that prompt new thoughts and practices. We, the coeditors, created this online, open-access journal in 2020. Responding to a moment when digital space became the default site of learning and theatrical storytelling, we sought to investigate issues of materiality and liveness in those spaces. Prompt hosts conversations between artists, teachers, and scholars in theatre and performance studies. Each volume puts two sets of materials in conversation. Our first volume, "Teaching Theatre with Things," grew from the MFA graduate pedagogy seminar at the Pennsylvania State University. When we switched to remote learning, the graduate students—designers, directors, and technologists—met over Zoom to complete an exercise we had begun in our live seminar: How might we teach each other something about theatre using a humble object? A costume design student taught us about creating character using socks. A scenic designer illustrated the difference between 2D and 3D [End Page 54] design using a knife and a bagel. We took six videos from this experiment and asked scholars to respond to them. A second issue of this volume produced six more teaching videos. Prompt, volume 2021, pairs discarded scenic design models with plays. Each playwright is asked to write a play that takes place in a discarded scenic model's world. As of this writing, we have produced two issues of this volume, and a third will feature one-minute musicals. In this way, Prompt is both an homage and a reframing of the dramaturgy used in Imagined Theatres, conceived and edited by Daniel Sack. Just as each "imagined theatre" contains both a theatre and its gloss, so we reached out to scholars and playwrights and teachers, asking them to write something in response to an artifact of a fellow theatre artist's practice. We have plans for future volumes, all of which will continue to grow this public space where theatre artists, educators, and scholars converge to exchange ideas that engender innovation. A feature of every issue is a podcast with a theatre theorist we admire. We have interviewed Ariel Nereson about theory and dance, Jane Barnette about theories of dramaturgy, and in our current issue, "Monologues," we interviewed Samer Al-Saber about a broad range of subjects, including the monologue as a Palestinian form, performance as solidarity, and his own work as a playwright. What follows is an excerpt from that interview. The full interview transcript can be found at www.promptjournal.org. The Gaza Monologues jeanm arie higgins: So can you tell us about The Gaza Monologues, what is the project? How did you discover it? How can we engage with it? samer al-saber: I discovered The Gaza Monologues when I was in Ramallah about ten years ago. ASHTAR Theater did a full production that I saw at the cultural palace there. I was amazed by the language, by the production itself, by the acting, by the presence of everyone there. I don't remember how many people were there, but it was in the hundreds. A full house. And so the experience of the young people in Gaza during a war, being under siege, under attack, and being able to engage with theatre, being able to tell their stories was quite powerful. And then when I was coming up with the concept for an anthology of plays produced in Palestine, created in Palestine by Palestinians for Palestinians in Palestinian theatres, the monologues had to be there and so, Gary English and I edited this anthology called Stories Under Occupation: [End Page 55] And Other Plays from Palestine, which has The Gaza Monologues in it. When the latest events were happening in May [2021], the air raids, the attacks on Gaza, I was in a bit of a paralysis of not being able to do anything. And I opened the anthology and there were those plays. And I thought...

Vladimir Alexi‐Meskishvili (1941–2021)

Vladimir Alexi‐Meskishvili (1941–2021)

Drama Etudes

Teaching theatre and drama in primary and secondary schools is a very difficult task worldwide. In China, there is a huge demand for drama teachers who also know practical theatre. Taking on this mission, the Shanghai Theatre Academy started a program of “drama etudes.” This pedagogical experiment stimulated debate about opposing concepts in theatre education: imitation vs. improvisation.

Gestures toward a Hemispheric Theatre History: A Work in Progress

Gestures toward a Hemispheric Theatre HistoryA Work in Progress Patricia Ybarra (bio) For this issue on hemispheric theatre history I ask the following question: How does one teach a theatre and performance history survey course from a hemispheric perspective? For me, this investigation has a long history. It is an ongoing practice responsive to methodological and theoretical changes in the field and to the political conditions within which I teach. The recent incorporation of Latin American theatre forms into canonical theatre history texts attests to the fact that these performances are now a part of a global theatre history.1 This is not merely an additive operation but an epistemological one that questions the definition of performance. That is, survey classes can frame performance in the way advocated by Diana Taylor and others: as a mode of knowledge production including indigenous forms of cosmology that are not contained by Western European definitions of theatre.2 I have been an advocate of this shift in focus—a commitment I share with many scholars whose work in this area preceded my own: Taylor, Adam Versényi, Jean Graham-Jones, Jill Lane, and Tamara Underiner, among others.3 The recent revisions to my syllabus, however, signal a move from teaching theatre history as a Latin Americanist to teaching theatre history from an Americas or hemispheric perspective. This move overtly links global theatre history to Aníbal Quijano’s conception of the coloniality of power and to Gerald Vizenor’s theorization of indigenous survivance. Quijano’s theory maintains that the creation of race and the emergence of modern capitalism are coincident with an idea of America created during the Spanish Conquest, during [End Page 123] which European invaders labeled non-European people as inferior so as to dominate them.4 Gerald Vizenor’s term “indigenous survivance” frames creative practice by indigenous people as an active presence outside of the tragedies of colonialism and disappearance that occurred subsequent to the events Quijano describes. Vizenor’s theorization, it should be said, emerges from forms of settler colonialism that utilize reservation and boarding school systems, which were largely with the US and Canada, rather than forms that attempted to destroy indigenous culture through other means.5 Ironically, then, making my syllabus truly hemispheric meant paying more attention to the US and Canada. This shift in thinking was made possible by two people: my student Lilian Mengesha, whose dissertation brings together Canadian, US, and Mexican/Central American thinking about land, gender, and vulnerability, and Monique Mojica, with whom I taught a course on indigenous performance in fall 2016.6 In this essay, I will narrate my development of a theatre history course that meets the demands of the move to decolonize one’s syllabus while teaching the fundamental methods of performance historiography. A History of My Theatre History When I arrived at Brown in 2004, I began teaching a theatre history course, Theatre Arts and Performance Studies (TAPS) 1240, which covers theatre and performance history from 1500 to 1850. I have taught it most years from then until now. TAPS 1240 is a required course for most tracks in our theatre arts and performance studies concentration (our term for a major). The course is one of a three-course sequence on theatre and performance history. The course is part lecture and part discussion and usually enrolls between twenty and thirty students, most, but not all, of them concentrators. Presently, I combine a textbook (Theatre Histories, Tobin Nellhaus, General Editor) with plays, performance scripts, and theoretical essays as readings for the course. The course has a midterm, a presentation, a final exam, and a final paper that requires archival research. When I began teaching, the faculty wanted to change the curriculum so that TAPS 1240 would be global rather than simply Western in focus.7 The political and social movements during these 350 years necessitated that this course not simply be one about theatre and performance during a particular period but an historiographical investigation into how theatre and performance participate in, embody, and defy the emergence and development of colonialism (the policy of acquiring full or partial control over another country or area, exploiting [End Page 124] it...

Defining the stage director and teaching theater directing

A provocation reflecting on puppet theatre directing, the director’s tools,teaching and training philosophy.

Engaging difference through theatre: border pedagogy in Southeast Asia

ABSTRACT Southeast Asia’s location as a crossroads between East and South Asia, marks it as a region deeply entrenched in difference, with a history of complex identities. Apart from indigenous cultures that have survived the tides of change, there are several deeply embedded cultural influences from near and far that constitute what is local. Education that engages with this complexity mustnegotiate the borderlines of culture that contribute to how Southeast Asian nations apprehend themselves, and in relation to each other. In this article, I propose a critical approach to “regionalist” education in Southeast Asia by engaging with issues of culture in teaching and learning contemporary theatre. I deploy Henry Giroux’s border pedagogy as a working frame to grapple with difference in Southeast Asia, with particular reference to his view that borders are expressions of power that need to be interrogated through pedagogies of difference. I then describe and analyse how the learning process and assessment tasks created for an undergraduate module on Contemporary Theatre in Southeast Asia at a teacher-education institution in Singapore offer students a space to work with pedagogies of “difference” and “discomfort” and reconfigure the boundaries of their identities and communities as potentially local, regional and global.

The effectiveness of theatrical teaching in the development of concepts of intellectual security in the curriculum of Sunnah students in the intermediate stage in Riyadh: فاعلية التدريس الممسرح في تنمية مفاهيم الأمن الفكري في مقرر الحديث لدى طالبات المرحلة المتوسطة بمدينة الرياض

The study aimed to demonstrate the effectiveness of theatrical teaching in the development of the concepts of intellectual security in the Curriculum of the Prophet's biography among the students of the intermediate stage in Riyadh city. In order to achieve the objectives of the study, the two methods (descriptive based on content analysis and experimented with quasi-experimental design) During the course content of modern middle school, and a test of the concepts of intellectual security, and prepared two manuals: one for the teacher, the other for the student. After the verification of the validity of the study tool, its stability and materials, the experiment was applied on a randomly selected sample of the first grade students in the city of Riyadh, numbering 57 students. The sample was divided into two groups: one experimental, 29 students, The number of (28) students, and studied experimental using teaching theater, while studying the control using traditional teaching. The results showed that the experimental group obtained an average of 32.79 from 38, while the control group (21.79) was (38) with a difference of (11) points for experimental benefit, which confirms the effectiveness of the use of teaching theater In the development of concepts of intellectual security in the curriculum of modern students in the middle stage. In light of the findings of the study, she recommended a number of recommendations, including the establishment of specialized training programs for forensic science teachers, to train them to use theater teaching effectively, and to develop the concepts of intellectual security through the use of modern teaching methods such as theatrical teaching, ; Given the results of the study.

Signs of Change: New Directions in Theatre Education by Joan Lazarus, and: Artistic Literacy: Theatre Studies and a Contemporary Liberal Education by Nancy Kindelan (review)

Reviewed by: Signs of Change: New Directions in Theatre Educationby Joan Lazarus, and: Artistic Literacy: Theatre Studies and a Contemporary Liberal Educationby Nancy Kindelan Jeanne Klein Signs of Change: New Directions in Theatre Education. By Joan Lazarus. Revised and amplified edition. Chicago: Intellect Books, 2012; pp. 352. Artistic Literacy: Theatre Studies and a Contemporary Liberal Education. By Nancy Kindelan. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012; pp. 216. Theatre educators tend to be passionate, idealistic, and mission-driven lovers of theatre who strive to change our conflict-ridden and partisan-divided world, if only one student at a time. In their respective texts, Joan Lazarus and Nancy Kindelan encapsulate the passions of their lifelong careers in theatre education by calling upon us to take dramatic actions that may effect social change. In the midst of debates over educational reforms, both authors champion theatre as a means of fixing democracy by inducing socially responsible citizenship within local communities. In Signs of Change: New Directions in Theatre Education, Lazarus substantially amplifies an already mold-breaking 2004 text that appraises the very best practices for theatre by and with young people, grades K–12. Knowing full well that she cannot necessarily change “the whole world,” she seeks to change herself (and her readers) by questioning “what is, what could be, and what ought to be” for more progressive outcomes of theatre education that move beyond industrial-age paradigms of producing assembly-line plays irrelevant to students’ lives. Based on her extensive surveys, observations, and collaborations with more than 225 educators, she investigates alternative paradigms combining a consideration of the pioneering voices from the field with closer looks inside classrooms and rehearsal spaces on the emerging frontier of change. Rather than prescribe “how-to” lesson plans, Lazarus offers compelling exemplars of best practices from other change-seekers who care deeply about impacting students’ lives. Each cogently written chapter gives courage to both novice and master teachers by inviting us to reflect upon our current programs with multiple sets of provocatively worded questions, stimulating ideas for further reflection, and selected resources to inspire pedagogical changes. In chapter 1, Lazarus establishes what is “a pretty bleak view” of theatre education where, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, less than half of all secondary schools and a tiny minority of elementary schools mandate theatre as a subject. As high-stakes testing erodes arts instruction with escalating budget cuts, particularly in low-income schools, too few states offer teacher certifications in K–12 theatre, unlike the visual arts and music. Nevertheless, Lazarus offers hope in three subsequent chapters by synthesizing the interdependent characteristics of learner-centered, socially responsible, and comprehensive practices. With her steadfast focus on teaching studentsmore than teaching theatre per se, she valorizes learner-centered approaches in which students initiate and devise performative projects based on social conflicts of greatest concern to them and share artistic decision-making collaboratively with teacher-directors in more equitably balanced relationships. Learner-centered teachers facilitate students’ creative choices using Spolin’s organically derived techniques, Heathcote’s [End Page 223]“mantle of the expert,” and other applied theatre methods that place theatrical forms in service to the connected content of students’ lived experiences. Lazarus argues quite rightly that the extra labor-intensive time spent on rehearsals in learner-centered productions requires “a differentuse of time, but ultimately not more time” than traditional “read, stage, and run” models because self-directed students practice their delegated responsibilities efficiently during otherwise frantic technical weeks (87; emphasis in original). To explain socially responsible practices, Lazarus addresses the conditions of students’ increasingly diverse identities regarding poverty, disabilities, race, culture, languages, gender, sexuality, and spirituality. Most importantly, she considers how largely ignored ageism intersects with adults’ protective norms and offers helpful guidelines for choosing and facilitating age-appropriate materials. Building a caring, empathetic, and respectful community also depends on teachers avoiding burnout by taking care of themselves as another best practice, even as they strive to implement a comprehensive theatre education. Such a curriculum engages students in weaving eight practitioner roles (that is, researcher, playwright, director, designer, technician, actor, audience, and critic) with four methods of discipline-based inquiry (production, history, aesthetics, and...

El libro vivo que es el teatro: Canon, actor y palabra en el Siglo de Oro by Evangelina Rodríguez Cuadros (review)

Reviewed by: El libro vivo que es el teatro: Canon, actor y palabra en el Siglo de Oro by Evangelina Rodríguez Cuadros Anthony J. Grubbs Rodríguez Cuadros, Evangelina. El libro vivo que es el teatro: Canon, actor y palabra en el Siglo de Oro. Madrid: Cátedra, 2012. 334 pp. In El libro vivo que es el teatro, Evangelina Rodríguez Cuadros offers her perspective on the present and future states of early modern Spanish theater as it is performed, researched, and taught in the twenty-first century. She recognizes that in many cases Spanish Golden Age theater scholarship and performance has lagged behind that of other dramatic traditions. The author reflects on ways to make Renaissance and Baroque Spanish drama more appealing to a modern public and reiterates the need to remain on the cutting edge of current academic discussions. This is an uphill battle, Rodríguez Cuadros asserts, and it is necessary to take advantage of recent resources, especially the digital humanities, in which she has been extremely active for more than a decade. The book’s five chapters are composed of revised versions of previous studies, as well as unedited work. In the first chapter, Rodríguez Cuadros discusses the critical treatment that early modern Spanish theater has received both in and out of Spain since the eighteenth century, pointing to how it has never been deemed universal because it has been saddled to the historiographical predisposition of Spanish literary criticism. This perspective changed, however, starting in the 1960s, and staging and adaptation especially came into the spotlight starting in 1986 with the introduction of the Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico (CNTC), which initiated great advances in the performance and research of classical Spanish theater. In chapter 2, the author uses the auto sacramental as a point of departure for an insightful study of the actor in seventeenth-century Spain. Rodríguez Cuadros opts to examine this particular religious form because its production is better documented than other styles, and she proceeds to deconstruct the auto in order to reconstruct the role of the actor in relation to performance. Her third chapter astutely looks at theater theory by going beyond a mere comparison of opposing precepts. Rodríguez Cuadros also reflects on the concept of the ownership of a play text as it changes hands in the process of staging a dramatic work. Finally, the author continues her assessment of the role of actors then and now. Considerations of the adaptation of early modern works and what makes a successful adaptation are the topics of the fourth [End Page 131] chapter. Here, Rodríguez Cuadros points to the insight of the actors, especially in their memoirs, and a collective memory of past performances for clues. She notes, however, that most adaptations of early modern Spanish theater were museum pieces with little innovation until the CNTC was formed. Her compelling discussion of adaptation adds to the continuing discourse among theater scholars, directors, and actors in their attempt to define and understand the term. The final chapter elucidates Rodríguez Cuadros’s approaches to teaching theater and the useful theories and other tools—especially her work with digital humanities in Valencia—that can help us overcome the challenges of comedia scholarship, pedagogy, and representation. Rodríguez Cuadros’s commentary on early modern Spanish theater studies is germane, but it is at times presented in a nebulous manner, especially in the introduction. The chapters are replete with discerning insight, but they do not always mesh in a seamless manner. While each essay holds together on its own, on the whole the work lacks a clear thread to connect its parts. Another shortcoming is the almost complete disregard for research done outside of Spain and, perhaps even more disquieting, the omission of the performance tradition of early modern Spanish theater in North and South America. One example in particular stands out: the Siglo de Oro Spanish Drama Festival at the Chamizal National Park in El Paso, Texas, which started in 1976. The study does, nonetheless, present an exhaustive survey of work done in Spain. In El libro vivo que es el teatro, Rodríguez Cuadros demonstrates a...

The Art of Remembering: Camille Billops and James Hatch

Founded in 1972, the Hatch-Billops Collection houses an extensive archive of African American memorabilia and exists as a direct result of the 1965 “open admissions” policy at the City College of New York, where James Hatch was teaching theater history. Today the collection’s mission is threefold: to collect and preserve primary and secondary resources in the black cultural arts; to provide access to these materials to artists, scholars, and the general public; and to develop programs in the arts that would use the materials in the collection. This essay examines the importance of archiving black American culture and the lives of Hatch and Camille Billops, the artists who have made it their life’s work.

Ken Wilson: Author, Teacher, and Teacher Trainer

Ken Wilson is an author and trainer. He has written more than thirty ELT titles, including a dozen series of course books, including Smart Choice for Oxford University Press (OUP). He also writes lots of supplementary material, and in 2008, OUP published Drama and Improvisation, a collection of more than 60 of his ELT drama and motivational activities. His first publication was a collection of songs called Mister Monday, which was released when he was 23, making him at the time the youngest-ever published ELT author. Since then, he has written and recorded more than 150 ELT songs, published as albums or as integral parts of course material. He has also written more than a hundred ELT radio and television programs for the BBC and other broadcasters, including fifty radio scripts for the Follow Me series, thirty Look Ahead TV scripts and a series of plays called Drama First.Until 2002, Ken was artistic director of the English Teaching Theatre, a touring company which performed stage-shows for learners of English. The ETT made more than 250 tours to 55 countries, including three visits to Japan. Ken is an enthusiastic blogger, tweeter and social networker. He lives in London England with his wife Dede and two cats, and works in a shed at the end of his garden.

Financialization of Education: Teaching Theatre History in the Corporatized Classroom

Financialization of Education: Teaching Theatre History in the Corporatized Classroom

The Professor’s Desire

The Professor’s Desire Anca Parvulescu (bio) Roland Barthes. THE NEUTRAL. Trans. Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier. New York: Columbia UP, 2005. Trans. of Le Neutre. Paris: Seuil, 2002. I add: a reflection on the Neutral, for me: a manner—a free manner—to be looking for my own style of being present to the struggles of my time. —Roland Barthes, The Neutral What I am looking for, during the preparation of this course, is an introduction to living, a guide to life (ethical project): I want to live according to nuance. —Roland Barthes, The Neutral Le Neutre reaches us late. Like an echo, it needed time, and it took its time to come. The second of the three courses Roland Barthes gave at the Collège de France between 1977 and 1980, Le Neutre was published in 2002 by Éditions du Seuil, following the editorial work of Thomas Clerc, under the direction of Éric Marty.1 Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier’s translation as The Neutral brought it to life in English in 2005. After thirty years, Le Neutre comes indeed late, but perhaps its lateness, the time of the echo, is part of its very scene. Barthes did not conceive of Le Neutre as a book. It was a course, to happen as a onetime affair and then be put aside: “We’ll have to hold on to the unsustainable for thirteen weeks: after that, it will fade” [13]; “This course is made to die on the spot” [250]. As such, the course is not only an attempt to do justice to a “subject,” to which, Barthes insists, we should not hold on once the course is over, but also to meditate on the very situation of teaching.2 The course on the neutral offers the occasion to ask, What is it to teach? And teaching, we soon find out, is a matter of desire: the course should have been called The Desire for the Neutral. The teacher follows his desire and, in doing so—Barthes is reminded by a student—inflects and curbs the student’s desire. What is it, then, that one desires when one desires the neutral? The teacher is pressed to offer something by way of definition: I define the Neutral as that which outplays [déjoue] the paradigm, or rather I call Neutral everything that baffles the paradigm. For I am not trying to define a word; I am trying to name a thing: I gather under a name, which here is the Neutral. [6] The neutral is a “thing” (no qualifying adjective) that outplays, baffles, or dodges the “implacable binarism” of language as seen through Saussurian linguistics: in order to [End Page 32] produce meaning, one is in the same breath choosing A and refusing B. The search here is for a ”thing” that might suspend, thwart, or elude the paradigm, what Barthes calls its arrogance. Indeed, what would it mean to escape the necessity of choosing, say—this is Barthes’s first example—between je ris (I laugh) and je lis (I read)? A problem for the teaching theater unfolds: the moment one names the “thing,” one brings it into the paradigm, constructing an opposition between the neutral and arrogance. The scene of teaching performs an aporia: “Neutral = impossible; to speak it is to defeat it but not to speak it is to miss its ‘setting up’ [. . .] to speak this cacophony, I need a course” [29]. There is an obvious tension between teaching, its demands for clear and transparent meaning-making and inherent institutional arrogance, and the neutral. “Arrogance”: “the taking of too much upon oneself as one’s right; the assertion of unwarrantable claims in respect of one’s own importance; undue assumption of dignity, authority, or knowledge” [OED]. The teacher is inevitably occupying the place of arrogance. Indeed, foregrounding its righteousness and authority, arrogance is standing, a position Barthes associates with a certain kind of fascism. The neutral teacher struggles to dodge the arrogance inherent to the teaching scene. Sitting, he stammers, cacophonizes. One speaks, but one accompanies speaking with a continuous performance of an apology for speaking.3 The teacher does not offer an anchor in...

Theatre in Education in Cape Schools: Reflections on South African Theatre Making practices

In this article, I shall explain why we began teaching Educational Drama and Theatre to undergraduates at the University of Cape Town, why I investigated the processes involved, and what questions this research has raised for me. The task of Theatre in Education performers is teased out in relation to what I have witnessed in TIE programmes, found in reports written by students and ideas proposed by theatre theorists. The four contextual frames through which John OToole considers Theatre in Education; namely neighbourhood ethos, venue, audience availability and the fictional world of the play; provides a workable means with which to examine the effects of these different factors on performance. The interaction between the performers, the performance site and the audience in Theatre in Education suggests possibilities for a more flexible approach to theatre making by South African theatre practitioners.

Duke University School of Medicine.

Duke University School of Medicine.

HyperCourseware for interactive instruction in the electronic classroom

An electronic classroom with computer workstations and multimedia offers tremendous poten­ tial for interactive instruction. To support such instruction, HyperCourseware was developed as an environment and authoring system that recreates on a computer network familiar objects of instruction, such as the syllabus, lecture notes, class rolls, seating charts, exams, and grade lists. In addition, it provides interactive and collaborative tools for group discussion, anonymous feedback, student polling, and shared collaborative workspaces. Applications in statistics and cognitive psychology are discussed along with the specific advantages due to hypermedia links, structure of course materials, integration of parts, and classroom interactivity. Student and faculty evaluations have supported the positive educational benefits of both the electronic classroom and HyperCourseware in general. An electronic classroom is a special room outfitted with computer workstations for each student and for the in­ structor. The computers serve multiple functions. They may be used for taking notes, for taking exams, for par­ ticipating in class discussion, for presenting lecture and textbook material, as scratch pads, and sometimes as com­ puters. All of the computers in the classroom are net­ worked and tied into a shared file server, which allows information to be exchanged between the students and the instructor. In addition, the electronic classroom has high­ resolution video projectors that serve as electronic black­ boards for displaying what is on any of the computer mon­ itors or for use in multimedia presentations. The Electronic Teaching Theater

Technical aspects of the AT&T Teaching Theater at the University of Maryland at College Park

This paper describes the technological aspects of the AT&T Teaching Theater at the University of Maryland at College Park. These can be separated into four categories: computers, networks, audio/video, and control. All electronic equipment in the Teaching Theater is interconnected: the computers form a local-area-network which is also attached to the Campus network; the computer monitors, keyboards, and mice are interconnected via a signal-switching system; all A/V devices are connected to a video signal switcher which is connected to the computers and to the Campus video cable system; and the control system permits convenient operation of the computers, A/V, and room lighting.

The AT&T teaching theater at the University of Maryland at College Park

The University of Maryland at College Park, with the support of AT&T, has designed and constructed a classroom where technology is used to promote teaching and learning. That is, the focus is on teaching and learning, not on the technology; the computers, networking, and audio/visual equipment are simply a means to help accomplish effective learning. The result is called the AT&T Teaching Theater: "Using technology to transform lectures and learning."

The electronic teaching theater: Interactive hypermedia and mental models of the classroom

The introduction of hypermedia into the classroom presents both an opportunity to expand the power of teaching through electronic facilitation of the media and a challenge to redesign the classroom and instructional environment to exploit the enhanced features of hypermedia. This paper briefly surveys the current state of computers in the classroom and then argues that a more integrated approach is required. To this end, the concept of an electronic teaching theater is proposed which takes advantage of hypermedia and collaborative work environments. The aim of the electronic teaching theater is not to totally redesign the classroom and instructional interaction, but rather to facilitate it using well understood metaphors to lay out the dynamics of classroom interaction on the electronic media and to use the results from research in human/computer interaction to design the interface. To facilitate the application of hypermedia, a model of instructional interaction among the students, the instructors, the course material, and the products of instruction is presented. A number of component models pertaining to course preparation, lectures, note taking, and other instructional activities are then discussed that should prove useful in designing the electronic classroom. The origin of these models is the mental representation of the interaction as perceived by the teacher and the student. The idea is to start with such models as a base metaphor, to instantiate the metaphors in the electronic classroom, and then to explore innovations in the technology that go beyond the strict application of the metaphor.

Master teachers of theatre: observations on teaching theatre by nine American masters

The play's the thing-- but what's a play? / Bernard Beckerman -- Historical study in the theatre curriculum / Oscar Brockett -- In the beginning was the word / Claribel Baird -- Zen in the art of actor training / Robert Benedetti -- Movement for actors /Jewel Walker -- The craft of the eclectic / Carl Weber -- Teaching design for theatre / Howard Bay -- Essential theatre for the high school / Wallace Smith -- The drama of childhood/the childhood of theatre / Agnes Haaga.