My Teaching Philosophy
If we accept the idea that the revolutionary enterprise of a man or a people has its source in their poetic genius, or more precisely, that this enterprise is the inevitable conclusion of poetic genius, we must reject nothing that makes poetic exaltation possible.
--Jean Genet (1970) from his introduction to Soledad Brother
In my four years as an educator at Cornell, and five with a prison theatre group, I have been guided by the teachers who fomented revolutions in me. Revolution is an apt metaphor for the situation of learning in the liberal arts, in the senses of both radical upheaval, and rotation or turning. Learning entails asking transformative questions that challenge the status quo. The students I encounter have diverse backgrounds: Many bring little prior knowledge of the material, and I seek to complicate what knowledge they do bring. Liberal arts students studying theatre learn to turn and approach problems from multiple angles: for example, incorporating history and social science to help stage a dramatic scene. Likewise, performance skills help students to work in other disciplines by attending to questions of setting, story, embodiment, and audience. In theatre, students learn by doing, which complements their analytical and discursive skills, and leads to revolutions in their concepts of themselves as academic citizens.
Because of my experience as an actor and director, as well as my doctoral training, I am equipped to teach undergraduate courses at multiple levels, including: acting; directing; applied and physical theatre; devising; prison theatre; performance and drama theory; and political performance. My objective is for students to develop methods of knowledge generation that are affective and embodied. Cornell undergraduates cloister themselves in their heads, in large part learning through the written word. I emphasize physicality and ensemble in order to bring student attention into their bodies and to connect with their community of peers. Students perform rhythm-based collaborative exercises drawn from my training at the Moscow Art Theatre Studio to forge connections without using spoken language. They explore foundational physical, vocal, and compositional exercises from Viola Spolin. We stage silent scenes wearing masks made from paper bags to learn how physical action communicates meaning onstage, beyond vocal and facial expression. Only after they have developed close attention to techniques of embodied performance do students incorporate text onstage.
In directing the mainstage production of The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, I also served as instructor of record for the practicum, “Making Theatre: Rehearsal and Production Techniques.” By approaching the rehearsal space with professionalism and rigor, my goal was to guide student actors to make truthful, provocative choices. When directing, I also stress for students the importance of dramaturgical research in order to understand political, cultural, and historical context. Students come to understand that theatre production serves alongside their other scholarly activities as a powerful occasion to connect the academic community and stimulate public discussion.
As instructor of record, I created two sections each of the first-year writing-intensive seminars, “‘You’ve Got Time’: An Introduction to Prison and its Representation” and “The Prison Plays: Crime, Punishment, and Western Dramatic Literature.” In these courses, students improved their critical, persuasive, and creative writing skills through close study of mass incarceration and its representation in art and media. These seminars are discussion-based, and I use technology and online discussion forums to engage students beyond the classroom, which greatly improves in-class performance. Invoking a metaphor from Peter Zazzali and Jeanne Klein, I also see technology as a crucial tool for focusing “offstage” activities, intensifying the “onstage” experience within classroom time.
Additionally, I served as a teaching assistant in a variety of courses: “Introduction to Acting,” “Fundamentals of Directing,” “Prisons,” “Shakespeare On Stage,” and “Mastering College Reading and Writing.” As teaching assistants, graduate students in the Department of Performing and Media Arts not only coach actors, guest lecture, and grade assignments, but we are also closely mentored by professors to develop pedagogical theory and effective classroom practices. I have gained invaluable experience, from lecturing to classes of over 150 students to providing one-on-one writing instruction, through my various teaching assignments and opportunities at Cornell.
Prison theatre work informs my overall philosophy for teaching because it emphasizes collectivity, empowerment, and transformation. Rather than reinforcing constraining notions of learning and success, teachers can lead students to generate knowledge in an active and lively collaboration that has radical implications. My forthcoming article, “Pedagogies of Self-Humanization: Collaborating to Engage Trauma in the Phoenix Players Theatre Group” (Teaching Artist Journal), co-written with Bruce Levitt, discusses how practicing theatre to cope with trauma constitutes a pedagogy of self-humanization. For my incarcerated student artists, performance is a tool for understanding more about themselves. They use this understanding to shape the harsh and guarded environment of their confinement. In turn, the experience co-facilitating this process as a civilian volunteer contributes to my own self-understanding and commitment to social change, and has influenced my philosophy for teaching Cornell students. Drawing upon Paolo Freire, as well as Bessel van der Kolk’s studies of the psychological benefits of embodied practice, I believe that engaging students from the “bottom” up, empowering them to take charge of their own academic paths, improves their personal wellbeing holistically. The effects of this individual empowerment ripple out collectively into the community, and can contribute to social justice causes, battling racism, misogyny, transphobia, ableism, and other social ills. I try to empower incarcerated students to change the world from the inside, while at the same time empowering the non-incarcerated to change it from without. In doing so, my teaching instigates students to actively shape the world around them, and to use critical thought as a tool for social transformation.
If we accept the idea that the revolutionary enterprise of a man or a people has its source in their poetic genius, or more precisely, that this enterprise is the inevitable conclusion of poetic genius, we must reject nothing that makes poetic exaltation possible.
--Jean Genet (1970) from his introduction to Soledad Brother
In my four years as an educator at Cornell, and five with a prison theatre group, I have been guided by the teachers who fomented revolutions in me. Revolution is an apt metaphor for the situation of learning in the liberal arts, in the senses of both radical upheaval, and rotation or turning. Learning entails asking transformative questions that challenge the status quo. The students I encounter have diverse backgrounds: Many bring little prior knowledge of the material, and I seek to complicate what knowledge they do bring. Liberal arts students studying theatre learn to turn and approach problems from multiple angles: for example, incorporating history and social science to help stage a dramatic scene. Likewise, performance skills help students to work in other disciplines by attending to questions of setting, story, embodiment, and audience. In theatre, students learn by doing, which complements their analytical and discursive skills, and leads to revolutions in their concepts of themselves as academic citizens.
Because of my experience as an actor and director, as well as my doctoral training, I am equipped to teach undergraduate courses at multiple levels, including: acting; directing; applied and physical theatre; devising; prison theatre; performance and drama theory; and political performance. My objective is for students to develop methods of knowledge generation that are affective and embodied. Cornell undergraduates cloister themselves in their heads, in large part learning through the written word. I emphasize physicality and ensemble in order to bring student attention into their bodies and to connect with their community of peers. Students perform rhythm-based collaborative exercises drawn from my training at the Moscow Art Theatre Studio to forge connections without using spoken language. They explore foundational physical, vocal, and compositional exercises from Viola Spolin. We stage silent scenes wearing masks made from paper bags to learn how physical action communicates meaning onstage, beyond vocal and facial expression. Only after they have developed close attention to techniques of embodied performance do students incorporate text onstage.
In directing the mainstage production of The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, I also served as instructor of record for the practicum, “Making Theatre: Rehearsal and Production Techniques.” By approaching the rehearsal space with professionalism and rigor, my goal was to guide student actors to make truthful, provocative choices. When directing, I also stress for students the importance of dramaturgical research in order to understand political, cultural, and historical context. Students come to understand that theatre production serves alongside their other scholarly activities as a powerful occasion to connect the academic community and stimulate public discussion.
As instructor of record, I created two sections each of the first-year writing-intensive seminars, “‘You’ve Got Time’: An Introduction to Prison and its Representation” and “The Prison Plays: Crime, Punishment, and Western Dramatic Literature.” In these courses, students improved their critical, persuasive, and creative writing skills through close study of mass incarceration and its representation in art and media. These seminars are discussion-based, and I use technology and online discussion forums to engage students beyond the classroom, which greatly improves in-class performance. Invoking a metaphor from Peter Zazzali and Jeanne Klein, I also see technology as a crucial tool for focusing “offstage” activities, intensifying the “onstage” experience within classroom time.
Additionally, I served as a teaching assistant in a variety of courses: “Introduction to Acting,” “Fundamentals of Directing,” “Prisons,” “Shakespeare On Stage,” and “Mastering College Reading and Writing.” As teaching assistants, graduate students in the Department of Performing and Media Arts not only coach actors, guest lecture, and grade assignments, but we are also closely mentored by professors to develop pedagogical theory and effective classroom practices. I have gained invaluable experience, from lecturing to classes of over 150 students to providing one-on-one writing instruction, through my various teaching assignments and opportunities at Cornell.
Prison theatre work informs my overall philosophy for teaching because it emphasizes collectivity, empowerment, and transformation. Rather than reinforcing constraining notions of learning and success, teachers can lead students to generate knowledge in an active and lively collaboration that has radical implications. My forthcoming article, “Pedagogies of Self-Humanization: Collaborating to Engage Trauma in the Phoenix Players Theatre Group” (Teaching Artist Journal), co-written with Bruce Levitt, discusses how practicing theatre to cope with trauma constitutes a pedagogy of self-humanization. For my incarcerated student artists, performance is a tool for understanding more about themselves. They use this understanding to shape the harsh and guarded environment of their confinement. In turn, the experience co-facilitating this process as a civilian volunteer contributes to my own self-understanding and commitment to social change, and has influenced my philosophy for teaching Cornell students. Drawing upon Paolo Freire, as well as Bessel van der Kolk’s studies of the psychological benefits of embodied practice, I believe that engaging students from the “bottom” up, empowering them to take charge of their own academic paths, improves their personal wellbeing holistically. The effects of this individual empowerment ripple out collectively into the community, and can contribute to social justice causes, battling racism, misogyny, transphobia, ableism, and other social ills. I try to empower incarcerated students to change the world from the inside, while at the same time empowering the non-incarcerated to change it from without. In doing so, my teaching instigates students to actively shape the world around them, and to use critical thought as a tool for social transformation.