introduction to the course
first off: the basics
The central aim of this course is to give each student enrolled a chance to explore at some length the experience of being an audience for theatre, to become more aware of the potential complexity and richness of that experience, to understand how knowledge, understanding and expectations can shape and alter that experience, and to reflect in writing on that experience and the learning about it afforded by the course. It is not a course in drama production; it is, rather, a course in understanding how experience on the page and experience of the stage are related. If many courses in English might be called courses in reading (and writing), this is a course in experiencing theatre and in the relations between reading plays and attending performances of them (and reading and writing).
It is also a course organized in a very different way from most, and it is important to understand the concrete differences at (or, preferably, before) the outset. It has, for example, some basic, categorical requirements, which must be fulfilled in order to get credit for the course. These are not optional. Furthermore, the deadlines are not flexible.
These supersede the ones outlined in the original course introduction, and which are reproduced below.
In addition, to qualify for (though not to be guaranteed) a mark higher than B+, a student must Participate actively in a small group (a "task force") doing research, and assembling a Web site on one play, and presenting their findings to the rest of the class, at least a week before the play opens (this may be one of the ten one-act plays, or either of the alternative plays) Participate actively in a small group selecting from and editing the findings of a task force to create "camera-ready" copy to be used as a "playgoers' guide," producing an agreed text of about 1000 words at least three working days before the play opens
Here are the basic requirements of the course (fuller explanations
are below):
This description is intended to be as thorough as I can make it, and I'll give you lots of opportunity to read, think about, and discuss it, because it's a very unconventional course and I would like it to be as clear as it possibly can be just what will be involved, so that, if it's not your cup of tea, you can find an alternative as soon as possible.
more generally
This course is organized and conducted very differently from most English courses. Probably the most immediately important thing you need to know is this: it's based on my attempt to put you in the best possible position to learn from your experiences, and to track, reflect on, and evaluate your own learning. The course, in other words, will attempt to provide you with rich, varied experiences of reading scripts, attending theatre performances, doing research on drama and theatre, and writing about all that to inform, persuade, engage or amuse other readers (rather than writing for a professor who evaluates and marks your writing). Your job will be to work at learning in the situation I try to provide. I will not lecture about theatre and reading -- though I will occasionally, usually in response to questions, talk about my own views and knowledge of those matters. I will not provide "feedback" on your work except in very specific ways, and, again, usually in response to questions. I attempt to provide a structure in which you can learn: the learning is something you have to do. It's not about learning from me; it's about learning with my help.
It's also important to bear in mind that this course, unlike most courses in English, is focused on a process -- not on a list of set texts, or on a particular literary form, period or person. What we'll be concerned with is the way in which a script evolves or develops as it gets from the reader's experience (the page) to the audience's (the stage), or vice versa, and the ways in which the readers' and the audience's experience of it are different. Another way to say this is to say we're concerned with how the situation a text is encountered in -- whether you read it in your room or see it in a theatre, what you know and expect in advance, how others feel about it -- can shape, or reshape, the way you understand, think and feel about, and respond to it. Equally important, you'll have opportunities to shape the situations in which you and others encounter texts.
The basic idea of the course is this: as a participant in it, you'll read the scripts for, read group reports on, attend productions of, and write about, a number of plays this term.
For one play, you may, if you choose, be a member of a "task force" group which conducts research on the play and its background and presents findings to the rest of the class; and, for another play, of a group which creates from the task force's work a "playgoer's guide" that will be printed, photocopied, and distributed with the programs at performances.
To make it possible to organize this, it should be clear, pretty much everything about the course will be rather different from a conventional course; it will be much more like a research and production studio or small enterprise. Class meetings will not be lectures, or even, usually, discussions: they'll either be working sessions or the venue for presentations by a task force of their research about a play. We are scheduled to meet every Wednesday and Friday from 9:00 to 10:15, but we may well not always meet for the entire time; or we may meet in the computer lab or the library; or we may not meet at all if our time would be better spent elsewhere.
being even more general
To begin with, here are some general considerations:
being more specific
Each of the headings below takes up a different aspect of the course.
In this course we will focus not on a set of defined texts, but on a question: what's the experience of theatre, how does it arise from and relate to texts, and how can the experience of it be influenced by knowledge, experience and understanding? I begin creating a situation in which to explore these questions by assembling a list of theatre productions planned for the local area -- or within a reasonable distance -- and choosing those that involve scripts and authors that it will be possible for us to find out about through library and Internet research. That list of plays constitutes the course's focal texts.
The central method of this course is what I call "collaborative investigation." This means that what actually happens in class meetings is quite different from what happens in many courses. There are no formal lectures. There is a minimal amount of full class discussion, and I do an equally minimal amount of explanation of background (as far as possible, I do this only in answer to questions). The primary activities during the course are individual and group investigation of the course's focal issues or questions. That means that members of the class read widely, do library and other research, interpret, describe and comment on their reading, read and learn from the work of others, and share what they learn in writing -- in large part through the medium of computer networks -- with the rest of the class. We learn, that is, from and with each other.
During the term, we will focus on plays actually being produced in the local area. For most, probably all, of the appropriate plays, the following will happen:
Most of the work of the course occurs in the library or at a computer, at the theatre, or reading independently. The scheduled class time is occasionally used for work in the library or the computer lab rather than in the classroom, and for presentations by task forces. One way to characterize the "collaborative investigation" approach, in fact, is to say that it is a course in how to use a library and other resources, such as the Internet, to find out about things -- how, that is, to learn independently. It is also, in effect, a course in writing in various forms and media, for various audiences, and for various purposes.
There are at least two ways in which this method is "collaborative." First, members of the class learn from, and teach, each other through research, discussion and writing; and, second, many of the actual tasks are undertaken and completed by groups rather than individuals. There are a number of reasons for this. One is that in many cases it's more efficient to spread a task among a number of people. Another is that doing things with others can promote conscious reflection on what you're doing, and why. And finally, it helps to counteract what seems to me an unfortunate tendency in education to produce graduates who don't know how to work with others because everything they've done in school has been organized on a rigidly individualistic and competitive basis. Learning how to organize and work in and through groups of people is often a difficult task; it's worth it.
The aims of this course are simply stated. At the end of it you should be more comfortable and engaged reading playscripts and attending theatre performances than you probably are now; and you should have a deepened understanding of the ways in which texts relate to performance, and of the ways in which context (knowledge, experience, and immediate situation) affects understanding and response. Perhaps equally important, you should have a clearer idea of what it means to learn about texts -- what research and publication is all about, in other words -- and you should be a more confident and more skilled learner, and a more confident and fluent writer. You should, that is, have enriched your store of the skills and knowledge necessary to begin learning about any new area of interest, not just this one.
computers, networks and the Web:
This course is computer-based, in that everyone will be required to circulate work to others in the class via computer networks -- email, Web-based discussion, a personal Web site. Extensive prior experience with computers is not necessary, but you will need to be willing to send and read email, to enter, edit, and save text in a specified format to a designated folder (which will be your Web site), to register and post on an online discussion form, and to use the library's physical and electronic resources, as well as the Internet and the Web, for research. We will use the STU computer labs and students' own computers, where they have them, for this (you will be able to do virtually all this work from computers off campus). If you haven't had much contact with computers, or with using computers for writing, or with the Internet, let me offer you this reassurance: you don't need to have had a "computer literacy" course -- or, indeed, to have much experience with computers at all; you'll have plenty of chances to learn what you need as we go. If you're not comfortable with computers, you should be interested in becoming so. If you are really and seriously computer-phobic or believe computers are evil, you should find another course. If you do already know something about computers, one of the main things you'll be doing early in this course is helping others (this course is, after all, mainly about sharing with others what you know or can learn).
This course does not use a printed and commercially published textbook. Instead, we use the resources of the library and the World Wide Web. Where texts are read in common, we find copies and share them, often in photocopied or online form. Play texts, for instance, are often photocopied and signed out from a central location. Money that would otherwise have gone for textbooks will go for theatre tickets. During the term we will create a series of collaboratively-written and -edited "Web pages," which will not only be used within the course, but which will serve as a public record of learning about the subject. We will also produce a number of "Playgoer's Guides" to theatrical productions, which will be printed and distributed at the theatre in advance of performances.
The question of evaluation is probably one you're already thinking about. People often ask, "In a course organized like this, how can I have any idea what mark I'm likely to get? I need to get some minimum mark to stay in school (or maybe to keep my scholarship, to get a job, etc.). In the usual class, I know what I can expect and I know pretty well what I need to do to be pretty sure of getting that mark: here, so much is new that I feel very vulnerable."
My primary concern in evaluating a student's work in this course is that the process be fair and open, that it be directly related to what the course is actually about, and that it not poison the learning process by focussing everybody's attention on marks. I believe people learn better when their attention is on the subject, on learning, and on teaching what they've learned to others, rather than on demonstrating their knowledge and ability to some authority. Members of the class should be able to feel confident that they will get a mark that makes sense to them, that they won't be surprised at the end of the course, and should be able to forget their anxiety about marks and get on with the work of learning.
One way in which I try to achieve this is simply by making the consistency and depth of each student's engagement in the course an important factor in determining her mark. One reason for this is that the course is founded on the assumption that to be involved actively in such a process is the best way to learn. If someone's genuinely, consistently and actively involved, and still doesn't learn, I think that's a problem with the course design, rather than with the student.
Yes, you're probably asking, but in practice how do I really get a mark in this class?
First of all, let me be reassuring. If you're used to getting a particular mark -- if you usually get Bs, for instance, or even if you usually get As -- you can be confident that if you work consistently and responsibly in this course you'll get at least the mark you'd usually get. You won't, of course, if you don't put in the time and effort and thought -- but if you do, my experience with courses organized in similar ways is that you have nothing to worry about. Let me explain how this works. It's not complicated, but it's very different from most schemes for determining marks, so it can seem complicated at first.
An individual's mark in this course is determined by two factors: (1) time and effort; and (2) how much of your own learning you can explain and demonstrate and convey to others. How are these measured, and how do they fit together to produce a mark?
This course has some categorical requirements. If you do not fulfill these requirements, you will not get credit for the course. I am happy to arrange for withdrawals without penalty whenever it becomes obvious that someone cannot fulfill them, for whatever reasons (and I always assume people have good reasons). I've listed the requirements above, but here they are again:
First, there's simply time and work put in. My basic rule of thumb for figuring out how much work a course should take is this: since a full-time professional job is usually expected to take about 40 hours of a person's week, and since this three-credit, one-term class is one-fifth of a full time load, I expect a student to put in about eight hours every week -- including time spent in class -- on work directly connected with this course. I have tried to estimate the various assignments and tasks so that they can be done in that amount of time, and if people report that they're consistently taking longer I'll change things. But basically the way I can know if you're putting in the time beyond simple attendance (since -- like other professionals -- you don't have a time clock to punch or a desk to be at) is by knowing whether you produce, on time and in the correct location, the necessary work: electronic mail, reports, postings to discussions, engagement in organizing and presenting web pages and publications, etc. I keep pretty thorough records of how much work people produce, how often they attend class, etc., and I use these records to generate, mathematically, a minimum mark somewhere up to a B. If someone does every single thing that it's possible to do her mark cannot fall below B. Not many people ever do that much work, of course, but in the majority of cases almost everyone in a class does enough work (usually, about three-quarters of the tasks I can identify and count) to guarantee a mark between B and C-. This minimum mark is calculated mathematically, and adjusted to make sure that anyone who's worked consistently gets a minimum higher than a C-. This, then, constitutes a floor or minimum grade. Once this grade is established, you cannot receive a lower grade (in other words, if you do every task I count during the term, your grade cannot be lower than B).
Two further tasks are necessary to qualify for a mark in the A range. One is that you must participate actively in a task force doing research on a play, and presenting the results of that research to the rest of the class; the other is that, for another play, you participate in an editorial team which selects from, reformats and edits, and arranges for publication, the material on the play which will constitute a printed playgoer's guide. Having done those things doesn't guarantee an A; it is, however, a necessary condition.
4. reflecting on your learning
How do you actually get an A, or a mark above the minimum, or any mark if your involvement doesn't qualify you for a minimum? The first thing to remember here is that this is in large measure a course in learning how to be aware of what you're learning, of knowing when you've become able to do or understand something you couldn't do or understand before. The second thing is that it's also in large measure a process of learning things yourself so that you can help others learn them (I believe the best way to learn is to teach). But of course this raises a couple of problems: how is it possible for me to keep track of how much you've helped other people learn, since I'm usually not there when that process is going on? And how can I possibly know whether you're becoming a better monitor of your own learning? In general, it happens because you think and write about the process, and that thinking and writing is used to generate an alternative to the minimum mark established by your participation. Here's how this works.
After the course is underway -- about the second week -- I'll invite you to begin a process whereby one of your regular weekly tasks will be to write a public reflective journal, keeping track of your own learning and sharing it with others. At the end of the term I'll ask you to go back though that journal and the rest of your work in the course, selecting from, editing, and focusing it, and produce a document which synthesizes and makes clear the important things you've learned and how you learned them. You might think of that final synthesis as an examination in which, fundamentally, you decide what to write about.
You'll make this document available publicly, and at some point I'll assess it and report the assessment to you. Primarily, though, I'll have a look at your edited reflective synthesis of your own learning, make my own judgment about how convincing and concrete it is, and determine a mark according to my judgment of the amount of learning demonstrated. In the past I've excerpted some particularly promising or effective such reflections and made them available on the course Web site. All of this will make up a second minimum mark, a qualitatively based one. You will receive whichever of the two marks is higher. It's important to be clear about this: the two marks are separate: one is quantitative, the other is based on my judgment of your learning reflection. You get the higher of the two.
Two things about this process need to be understood. One is that a minimum mark, generated by simple participation in the work of the course, can't be lowered. If you do the work, I can't decide later on that I don't like the way you did it. The second thing is that my judgment about the quality of your work and learning plays a very clearly defined role in this process. Most of the mark is generated by factors outside my judgment, but there are a couple of places where my judgment is crucial. First, below the possible B guaranteed by doing everything I have records of, I decide how much work is necessary to generate a given minimum mark (not on an individual basis, but for the class as a whole). Second, there's no way for me to evaluate the convincingness and concreteness of your learning log except subjectively: I simply make a professional judgment.
What will this require from you? Every week you'll need to spend a half hour or so identifying and explaining the most important learning you've experienced in the preceding period, and the people from whom you learned it, and how. The learning journal entries will "count" toward your commitment to the course, like other assignments, and by their nature (like many other assignments in this course), there's no way to do them later. I set up a program to "harvest" them (copy them to a storage area) automatically every Sunday night. So you'll need to budget the time to do this every week. I think you'll find it more than simply a task to get done: in my experience, this kind of log is the best possible way to make you feel more confident about your own learning.
I expect (or at least hope) that all this will make you able to forget about "grade anxiety" and get on with the course, that it will help you do work because it needs to be done rather than for a mark. One of the worst things about courses where you are often working with other people, or where you're expected to do the actual learning on your own, is the poisonous effect of not knowing "how you're doing," and your suspicion that other people are "getting by" with little work and you're not getting credit for all your own effort and ability (if you've worked in groups in a conventional class, where the group was marked as a whole, you've probably felt this). In this case, though, you'll know what your minimum mark is, and you'll also have a clearer idea than in most classes of how much you're learning .
It's probably obvious by this point that sheer persistence counts for a lot in this course: if you simply work regularly and consistently at it, you can't do badly. On the other hand, it's important to notice this: the course structure simply doesn't allow for a strategy which works quite well for many other courses -- that is, to take it easy through the middle of the term and then work really hard in the last few weeks. Work intended to inform others and help them with the next step in their learning can't be "made up later" -- it's like coming to a party the next day (this is especially true since stage productions are unique, time-limited experiences). Once you're behind in this course, in general it's extremely difficult or impossible to catch up. If that's your usual pattern, you'll have to change it; if you don't think you can change it, this in itself should be enough to make you seriously consider taking another course.
term papers, examinations, etc.:
It should be clear by this point that there is no "term paper" or final exam in this course. It's important to make it even clearer, however, that there's not therefore less writing or less work. Writing is used to explore subjects, as a tool for thinking, and to share information, ideas, feelings and learning, rather than as a way to demonstrate and measure knowledge. Students in this course, consequently, do a great deal more writing than usual.
This writing, though, is quite different in style and in content from that done in more conventional courses. It regularly describes or reports rather than analyzes or interprets, and it always has as its audience other members of the class who do not already know what the piece of writing has to say, and who need to know in order to continue their own work, or members of the public interested in finding out more about a play. Unlike most conventional classes, writing is not written to or for an instructor who, it is presumed, already knows what it has to say and whose aim is to evaluate it. Much of the writing in the course is circulated in "first draft" form; also, however, everyone spends significant time editing their own and other people's writing for "final publication" in Playgoer's Guides or on the course Web pages.
how writing works in a course like this
By dividing our efforts in these ways, and using writing to share what we learn, we can cover a far wider range of works, resources, and ideas than we could otherwise. One practical thing this means is that there are frequent short, focused research and writing tasks, scheduled according to the demands of the productions and the needs of others in the class. The purpose of these tasks is to spread knowledge and understanding -- first, around the class, and later to audiences in the theatre -- rather than to demonstrate to a teacher that the writer knows or remembers something.
I do not comment on or grade the documents or the presentations given written in connection with such tasks. (Often, in fact, I don't even have a chance to read many of the documents.) They are, however, read and used as part of the course by others in the class who need to understand what they say in order to get on with their own work -- and by theatre audiences as they wait for the curtain to rise. Thus they are tacitly (sometimes explicitly) evaluated by everyone involved. The readers of the documents are convinced, amused, informed, or engaged by them -- or they're not (and they may say so).
rationale
There are at least two reasons I use such methods. First, I believe that people learn far more effectively when they're actively trying to find things out and explain and demonstrate them to others than when they sit and listen to them. Second, I believe that there is no one authority on questions like these. Certainly neither me nor any textbook has the final word. In fact, there is no final word -- as you'll have a chance to discover, people are continuously coming to new understandings and discovering new things about these matters. Thus it's at least as important to know how to learn about such a subject as it is to be aware of what others think they already know. This course, then, is organized to promote (indeed, to require) the active and continuing engagement of each member of the class in the process of investigation. The course is based on the presumption that every member of the class is interested (or is willing to become interested) in learning about plays, scripts, productions, contexts, and the relations among those things; and it tries to build on, extend, and deepen that interest.
who I am and how you can reach me
I'm Russ Hunt (I much prefer to be called Russ. If you're uncomfortable with that, avoid "Professor" or "Doctor." Those terms make me uncomfortable. Use "Your Excellency.") You can reach me by email at hunt@stu.ca (much the best way), or by stopping by Casey Hall 308 (I'm there most mornings, and MWF afternoons), or by calling extension 424 (if you're off campus, 452-0424).
a final note
It probably will not be clear from this rather exhaustive description that the course is supposed to be fun -- but, according to many students who've taken this course in the past, it can be. At least it can if you think hard, meaningful work and fun can be compatible. Learning, talking, performing and writing are all, in the most fundamental possible way, social activities, activities that put people in touch with each other and with their world, making them part of an increasingly wide and rich social fabric. This course is designed to make those activities as social, as fruitful, and as enjoyable as possible. I hope you'll find them so.