Education Commons^™

Theatre As An Intervention For Empathy Development Among Undergraduate Students, Jonathan Stewart

Dissertations, 2014-2019

Empathy is the ability feel into, or put oneself in the place of another. It is the ability to walk in someone else’s shoes. Studies have shown that this ability is decreasing among today’s college students and on the rise as a desired trait for today’s leaders. This dilemma provides an interesting opportunity to explore how institutions of higher education can help develop the leaders of tomorrow by increasing empathy among students. Specifically, this research explores theatre as an intervention for empathy development among college students.

Theatre, as a program of study, is unique within the college experience in that …

A Review Of Annika Mann, Reading Contagion, By Michael Edson, Michael Edson

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

A review of Annika Mann, Reading Contagion, by Michael Edson

Mapping Urban Performance Culture: A Common Ground For Architecture And Theater, Ting Chin, Christopher B. Swift

Publications and Research

Our co-taught course focuses on theater history, with an emphasis on performance architecture. Assignments are designed to illuminate the ways in which architectural design and technology inform performance practices and audience reception. The pivotal assignment for exploring interdisciplinarity is a three-week module on mapping historical theaters in New York City. Open-source Global Information Systems (GIS) software serves as a common mechanism for students to situate theatrical productions in the context of the built urban environment, deepening their understanding of the social, economic, and artistic forces that contributed to performance culture. Mapping is a shared pedagogy for analyzing and presenting research …

Editor's Introduction To The 4th Issue Of The Pto Journal, Mark Weinberg

Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed Journal

This brief note from the new editor acknowledges the accomplishments of the previous editor and provides an introduction to this issue of the journal pointing to both continuity and change.

Review Of Valeria Appel’S “The Theatre Of The Oppressed For Beginners”, Ola Kraszpulska

Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed Journal

A review of Valeria Appel’s self-published book “The Theatre of the Oppressed for Beginners”

Book Review Of Radical Doubt: The Joker System, After Boal, Ann Elizabeth Armstrong Phd

Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed Journal

This is a book review of Radical Doubt: The Joker System, After Boal by Mady Schutzman, published by Routledge 2019.

Moving Forward, Living Backward, Or Just Standing Still?: Newspaper Theatre, Critical Race Theory, And Commemorating The Wade-Braden Trial In Louisville, Kentucky, Amy Steiger

Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed Journal

This essay, with a link to the full group-devised script of "Moving Forward, Living Backward, or Just Standing Still?" describes how graduate students entering an MFA acting program devised a performance inspired by the WPA’s Living Newspapers and Boal’s Newspaper Theatre to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Wade-Braden housing case in Louisville, KY. Drawing on critical race theory, I argue that the process, together with the script itself, offers an example of several ways performance can be used to remember and re-imagine a community’s racial history and future. It commemorated the trial itself, creating a public reminder of Louisville’s …

Creating Talk & Texts: Taking The Classroom Into The Community, Yvonne J. Montoya, Vera Coleman, Robert Fitzpatrick, Kevin Cano, Alison Gervais, Kaylynn Mcabee, Devon Miller, Alec Portillos, Eliana Taylor

Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed Journal

This project report highlights a partnership among Communication & Rhetoric university members and staff and students from El Centro del Quinto Sol which is a community recreation center. We describe the context and background of our project, workshops that employ Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) techniques, and provide some reflections and pictures documenting this joint learning experience.

The ‘I Am…’ Experience: Social Justice Art From Process To Product, Billicia Charnelle Hines, Ras Michael Courtney

Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed Journal

Paulo Friere said, “We cannot enter the struggle as objects in order later to become subjects.” Freedom Players is one of the two ensembles within the Black Theatre and Dance Program at Wayne State University. As a group of young Detroit based artists met and interacted, challenges arose as they realized their birth was political. These artists explored how they can survive and thrive in a place where everything seems to be set up against them. As clashes built, their journey lead them on a path of discovery and renewal. The result was I Am…, a performance piece that illuminates …

Digital Role-Playing Games As Means For Dialogue And Change For Marginalized Teachers, Jonathan Mendels, Amit Schejter

Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed Journal

This study presents a theoretical model that incorporates the theories of Paulo Freire, Augusto Boal and Amartya Sen and uses their ideas to create an innovative digital role-playing game for teachers on ‘To-Be-Education,’ a platform originally designed for teacher-student role-playing . We then demonstrate how Sen’s ‘capabilities approach’, Freire’s ‘pedagogy of hope’ and Boal’s ‘theatre of the oppressed’ are adapted to tools of empowerment for Arab-Israeli teachers, who belong to a community marginalized by State policies. The teachers design their own games and base the scenarios on their own real educational and professional dilemmas. They then re-enact these situations to …

The Teaching Of English In Lebanese Classrooms: A Critical Look At The Dominant Curricula And Practices, Nadia Bhuiyan

Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed Journal

Despite proclaimed attempts at post-colonial curricula, I argue that the teaching of English in Lebanon is a pronounced example of the deep-seated perpetuation of colonial privilege vis-à-vis curricular choices. To counter this cycle of privilege, I call for the application of culturally relevant pedagogy in English classrooms as a step in the direction of liberatory curricular reform in Lebanon. Culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) attempts to use students’ cultural competence in an empowering manner to help them achieve academic success. This article examines the use of the imposed curriculum in one English for Academic Purposes classroom in Lebanon, followed by the …

S1e4: How Do You Get From The Maine Woods To Broadway?, Ron Lisnet, Donald Holder

The Maine Question

In this episode, we explore the unique career path of lighting designer Don Holder, UMaine class of ’80 who has worked on Broadway, in film, television, opera and dance across the globe. His lighting designs have earned 13 Tony Award nominations and two Tonys — most notably for Disney’s “The Lion King,” which garnered him his first award in 1998. In this episode, Holder tells his story — beginning in the late ’70s when he was, of all things, a forestry major at UMaine.

This Is Me: Anxiety And Depression Awareness Event, Stephanie Cotrone

Honors Projects

College and life are stressful, but they don't have to be. We've all been in that place where it feels like life is caving in and there's nowhere else to turn, but it does get better. This event brings awareness to mental illnesses common on college campuses and in the community. There will be engaging and interactive activities to learn about anxiety & depression, and healthy ways to cope through music, art, theatre, amusement parks, learning, reading, and more. Performances by the Humanities Troupe and testimonies by current students who have had experience dealing with mental illness before or who …

Narratives Of Queerness: Queer Worldmaking (In) The Classroom With Undergraduate Students, Rachel Briggs

Doctoral Dissertations

This research brings together education research, queer theory, and performance theory to consider the worldmaking potential of the queer classroom. Using students’ stories about queerness in the classroom and my own stories about the classroom, I ask what we can learn from students’ voices about how queerness is/can be performed in the classroom and through relations. This study uses critical ethnography, personal narrative, and performative writing to examine the production of subject positions in the classroom, to connect this to a queer theoretical framework, and to explore the worldmaking potential of the classroom. I interviewed seven undergraduate students at a …

How To Help When It Hurts? Think Systemic, Corey L. Wrenn Ph.D.

Corey Lee Wrenn, PhD

To resolve a moral dilemma created by the rescue of carnivorous species from exploitative situations who must rely on the flesh of other vulnerable species to survive, Cheryl Abbate applies the guardianship principle in proposing hunting as a case-by-case means of reducing harm to the rescued animal as well as to those animals who must die to supply food. This article counters that Abbate’s guardianship principle is insufficiently applied given its objectification of deer communities. Tom Regan, alternatively, encouraged guardians to think beyond individual dilemmas and adopt a measure of systemic reconstruction, that being the abolition of speciesist institutions (The …

Ua12/2/2 2019 Talisman: Balance, Wku Student Affairs

WKU Archives Records

2019 Talisman yearbook.

• Mohr, Olivia. Balance
• Lunte, Hailee. That Warm Feeling Autumn Took from Me
• Dozer, Claire. Mother Load – Savannah Ranney
• Hubbs, Annalee. Tap After Hours – Dance
• Lancaster, Emily. Opposites Attract – Maddie Rediker & Cameron Blankenship
• Jones, Sydney. Delving into the Dirty – Taylor Gossage, Lion’s Den
• Chu, Phi. Snow Song
• Gordon, Zora. Spells & Spirit – Kristen Dalby, Witchcraft
• Powers, Noah. What is Left – Kelly Meredith, Identity Theft
• Aklilu, Bethel. Uprooting – International Students
• Steffey, Raegan. The Dirty Art Kids
• Dieudonne, Nadia. Self Starteres – Entrepreneurs
• Bass, Morgan. Young & Partisan – Politics
• Powers, Noah. …

Bibliography On Suffering, Simon C. Estok

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Domestic Trauma And Imperial Pessimism: The Crisis At Home In Charles Dickens’S Dombey And Son, Katherine E. Ostdiek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In “Domestic Trauma and Imperial Pessimism: The Crisis At Home in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son,” Katherine Ostdiek discusses Dickens’s representation of violence, grief, and recovery within the Victorian home as a pre-Freudian example of trauma. This comparison not only demonstrates the importance of trauma studies in the nineteenth-century, but more importantly, it thematically focuses empathy for the traumatized on the home. In this novel, Dickens dismisses topics related to the financial and social crises of mid-century Britain in favor of domestic themes that emphasize an idealized structure of the Victorian family. Through her use of trauma theory and …

Suffering And Climate Change Narratives, Simon C. Estok

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Suffering and Climate Change Narratives" Simon C. Estok begins with a brief survey of definitional issues involved with the term “suffering” and argues that there has been a relative lack of theoretical attention to suffering in climate change narratives, whether literary or within mainstream media. Estok shows that suffering, far from being singular, is a multivalent concept that is gendered, classed, raced, and, perhaps above all, pliable. It has social functions. One of the primary reasons for the failure of climate change narratives to effect real changes, Estok argues, is that they often carry the functions of …

The Punctum In History: Representing The M(Other)’S Death In Peter Handke’S A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, Hivren Demir Atay

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article aims to discuss how Handke’s autobiographical narrative, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (1972), stages the writer’s literary project through a neutral account of his mother’s suicide. Telling the story of his mother, who witnessed the Second World War and the nazi regime, Handke narrates the traumatic history of an Austrian town along with his own suffering. Concentrating on his attempt at a distanced language and his questioning of history as an objective fact, the article suggests that Handke’s perception of death and mourning parallels his understanding of the acts of writing and reading. Drawing particularly on Barthes’s concept …

The Different Representation Of Suffering In The Two Versions Of The Vegetarian, Young-Hyun Lee

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article “The Different Representation of Suffering in the two versions of The Vegetarian” the author examines how different the representation of suffering in the original and translated versions of The Vegetarian and explores the reasons for this difference. The author in particular refers to representative episodes which the translator’s strategy distorts even the central concepts of suffering in the original work. Her translated version results in critical misrepresentation of suffering and violence in the original version.

Introduction To Suffering, Endurance, Understanding: New Discourses Within Philosophy And Literature, Douglas S. Berman

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Literature is generally seen as depicting the lives of human subjects through their unique narratives. And that, while its endpoint may be universal, it is typically grounded in the specificity of a human being (or, occasionally, an animal). Philosophy is tasked with providing the foundational cognitive tools to grasp the meaning of experience for the whole. In Hegelian terms, it unfolds the history of the concept. Yet, as George Steiner, Jacques Derrida, and other recent authors have shown, both philosophy – along with its agonistic cousin, religion -- evoke literary themes, rhetorics, and struggles. Over the past fifty years, Continental …

A Deep-Er Practice For Educators: Reflecting, Unpacking And Confronting Racism Through Critical Performative Pedagogy, Natalia Ortiz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the current political climate, we have seen time and time again the killings of black and brown youth, witnessed the separation of immigrant families, and the mass murders caused by nativist xenophobic white rage. Teachers in schools across our country need to be better prepared to engage in critical race dialogues and need to understand their location in the larger educational system so to contest, rather than reproduce, racism. This study is based on the premise that teachers are not adequately learning about structural oppression that impact the experience of school children and are not trained in the art …

Reimagining The Flute Masterclass: Case Studies Exploring Artistry, Authority, And Embodiment, Sarah Carrier

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work explores the flute masterclass as an aesthetic, ritualized, and historically reimagined cultural practice. Based on fieldwork that took place between 2017 and 2019 in the United States, in Italy, and on the social media platforms Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, I argue that the masterclass—an extension of the master/apprentice system that dominates learning in the classical music tradition—is characterized by embodied qualities of artistry and authority. These qualities are not inherent, but are perceived through subjective, social, familied, and affective bodies.

Chapter One outlines the main themes and the research design. Chapter Two is a case study that analyzes …

Mimicry: A Short Play, Diana M. Pho

Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement

This short play is inspired by the author’s lived experience as a queer Vietnamese-American woman in academia and in US society. This theatrical piece, centered around two young women meeting for the first time after several years, reflects upon the mutable divergence of shared memory, while also exploring intersectional feminist theory and the Vietnamese-American community. This is also a critique of US-based stereotypes about young Asian-American women, and how social prejudices and microaggressions can result in internalized anti-Asian misogyny. Like the range of identities and life experiences that characters Laurel and Mattie have, the Asian diasporic experience in the United …

Movement In Elementary Education, Elizabete Bosse

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Movement in Education explores the impact of movement on the quality of a student’s learning experience in education. This thesis is the culmination of four years of study from 2019-2023 in East Tennessee State University’s education and dance programs. Participating in these programs has provided me with many opportunities to explore the impacts of movement pedagogy in elementary education. The research portion of this thesis focuses on the educational benefits of incorporating movement into classroom activities and assessments. The experiential portion of this thesis focuses on both observations and data collected from students in a 3rd grade classroom who participated …

Queering Black Greek-Lettered Fraternities, Masculinity And Manhood : A Queer Of Color Critique Of Institutionality In Higher Education., Antron Demel Mahoney

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Drawing heavily on Roderick Ferguson’s (2012) theory of institutionality, this dissertation constructs a counter-historical genealogy of racialized gender in higher education and U.S. society through the formation of black Greek-lettered fraternities. Ferguson argues that with the insurgence of minority resistance globally and domestically during the mid-twentieth century, hegemonic power took a new form. Instead of rejecting minority difference, power’s new network attempted to work through and with minority difference in an effort to absorb and restrict these radical formations within state, capital and academy frameworks—producing narrow or one-dimensional minority subjectivities. Established at the turn of the twentieth century, black Greek-lettered …

Urban Landscape In Mcewan's Narrative Representation Of Berlin, Barbara J. Puschmann-Nalenz

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Urban Landscape in McEwan's Narrative Representation of Berlin," Barbara J. Puschmann-Nalenz discusses the image of Berlin created in Ian McEwanﹸs novel The Innocent (1990) and the chapter titled "Berlin" in Black Dogs (1992). It starts from the hypothetical statement that while British literary fiction set in Berlin is rare after 1970 the genres of spy and detective novel, where crime and violence take center stage, shape the image of the city in highbrow narratives as well. The perspectivization of the cityscape, including its monuments, through the protagonists fundamentally influences its image. In The Innocent the limited view …

Okonkwo’S Reincarnation: A Comparison Of Achebe’S Things Fall Apart And No Longer At Ease, Mary J. N. Okolie, Ginikachi C. Uzoma

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Abstract: The reincarnation myth is a global concept, founded basically in religion and tradition. It was especially vibrant in the ancient times in places like Egypt, Greece, and in continents like Asia and Africa, which possess varying understandings of the myth. In Igbo tradition, for example, it is believed that reincarnation occurs within a family. And that some of the marks of reincarnation are usually the possession of the birthmark or certain other physical features and the exhibition of character and behavioral traits of a deceased person by a living member of his/her immediate or extended family. Thus, reincarnation entails …

"Il Y A De La Plèbe": Figurations Of The Minor Between Complicity And Dissent, Maria Muhle

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In this article I discuss the logic of “complicity” and “dissent” that, under current forms of ultra-neoliberal capitalism, is no longer (if it has ever been) one of opposition but rather corresponds to a logic of unrealized potentials, or “as ifs” that “manage” dissent and complicity in conjunction, and erase the dividing line between them, or their value as separate concepts. I examine the genealogy of this opposition and its dilution as a symptom of our contemporary political reality. Michel Foucault presented a paradigmatic view of this genealogy in his analysis of power and the taxonomic separation of three regimes …