JOHN A. HAWKINS
(with the Pedagogies Working Group, Centre for Cultural Studies/Centre d'études sur la culture, University
of Guelph)1
This article applies the anti-hegemonic principles and practices of alternative pedagogy that originated in the work of Paulo Freire, as developed by the Pedagogies Working Group of the Centre for Cultural Studies/Centre d'études sur la culture at the University of Guelph, to the teaching of Drama and Theatre at the post-secondary level in Canada. After outlining an MA curricular plan in Cultural Studies and the syllabus for a course on Collaborative Case Studies Methodologies, it develops principles, practices, a curricular outline, and a model syllabus for a proposed senior undergraduate course revolving around the site-specific planning, mounting, and reflecting upon a theatrical production as a full-year course in a Canadian university setting.
Cet article rend compte des principes et des pratiques de pédagogie alternative developpés par Paulo Freire tels qu'ils ont été mis en application par le Groupe de travail sur la pédagogie du Centre d'études sur la culture/Centre for Cultural Studies de l'University of Guelph en vue de l'enseignement de l'art dramatique et du théâtre au niveau post-secondaire au Canada. Après avoir proposé une approche curriculaire pour une maîtrise en Études sur la culture et le plan d'un cours, sur le Méthodologies cooperatives d'analyse le cas, il propose les principes, l'approche curriculaire et un syllabus possible pour un cours avancé de baccalaréat donné sur toute l'année, pleinement credité par une université canadienne et portant sur la planification, l'élaboration et l'analyse d'une production théâtrale specifique.
The Pedagogies Working Group of the Centre for Cultural Studies/Centre d'études sur la culture at the University of Guelph has been working since the spring of 1996 to develop alternative pedagogical and curricular strategies within the context of a Cultural Studies curriculum at the Master's level, applying principles developed at the intersection of Cultural Studies and Alternative Pedagogies to the specific cultural and institutional context of southern Ontario and the University of Guelph in the late 1990s.
The Group began by reading and discussing selected texts on alternative pedagogies including, but not limited to, texts specifically focussed on the teaching of Cultural Studies.2 All of these texts are, in one way or another, politically committed to changing the discursive environment in and contracts by which teaching and learning occur, and they have helped the Working Group to formulate principles for Cultural Studies pedagogies, classroom practices, and curricular development at Guelph. Because the concerns and goals of these discussions are closely congruent with my own thinking about the teaching of drama and theatre, and because Cultural Studies is fundamentally committed to doing, as opposed to "having," politics -- that is, to the application of its work in the public sphere in ways that are congruent with the necessarily material and public practice of theatre -- the work has also helped me to think through some of the issues I had raised in my earlier work "towards a materialist pedagogy" in Canadian drama and theatre teaching at the post-secondary level (Knowles, "Otherwise Engaged," "This Discipline"). In the first two sections of this article, then, I want to sketch some of the principles and applications that the Pedagogies Working Group has formulated for the development of its Cultural Studies MA curriculum, as a framework for developing an alternative pedagogy of drama and theatre in Canada.
It is important to note, however, that the Pedagogies Working Group has found that many of the readings it has considered seem reluctant to move beyond theoretical speculation and political positionings to focus on the practical, site-specific dynamics of alternative pedagogies as they play themselves out in particular settings, courses, and classrooms, and in the public sphere. The Group has recognized the need to push beyond theorizing toward the concrete example, and has been careful to foreground in its work the ongoing necessity of attending to both theory and specific practices in localized settings. A fundamental principle of Alternative Pedagogies in Cultural Studies, as in Theatre Studies, it seems, is that theory must always be practised, and practice must always be theorized. Clearly, then, the principles that the Group has been developing beyond the received critical pedagogy tradition, in its deliberations and its curricular work -- which has continually moved between the abstract and the concrete, the general principle and the particular practice, the hypostatized and the processual -- will be useful here only in so far as they can be applied, modified, and moulded to fit the specific dynamics of the drama and theatre classroom and curriculum in a Canadian university setting.
I
Alternative pedagogies, including Cultural Studies pedagogies, are intended to be determinedly anti-hegemonic. They are developed in order to reduce, and reduce the effects of, hierarchies in the production and valuation of knowledges and cultural practices; to resist the culturally reproductive work of institutionalized education in producing good and docile citizens in an essentially reproductive capitalist economy (both societal and institutional); and to foreground and negotiate difference -- including different ways of learning and knowing that emerge from cultural, class, racial, sexual, and gender differences. The Pedagogies Working Group, then, has concerned itself with the specific ways in which the effects of hierarchies and power relations between faculty and faculty, faculty and students, and students and students can be addressed in the classroom and the curriculum. Power relations are embedded in the structures of knowledge production that constitute the history of the academy and its relations with the public sphere, and are particularly visible in admission, tuition, and evaluation schemes that characterize reward and advancement in the academy and in other workplaces. It is clear that merely saying that alternative or Cultural Studies pedagogies interrogate those schemes and structures does not in itself disarm or avoid the problem of unequal power relations. The project, then, is to be aware of power relations as both an object of study and as part of the structural and processual dynamics of engaging in teaching, research, and creative work.
Similarly, in developing a pedagogical practice that is committed to the foregrounding of "difference" in the production of knowledges and creative practices, in institutional protocols, practices, and accreditation, it is crucial to develop methods of foregrounding and negotiating uneven (or different) knowledge bases in the classroom and in other sites of teaching and learning, and to develop ways of "doing difference" in classrooms that are to a greater or lesser degree homogeneous, and which in any case can never encompass all differences. This last suggests the need, while working with and acknowledging the cultural, disciplinary, and institutional make-up of each specific group of learners, to find ways of avoiding the simple replication and reproduction of the structures and knowledge of that particular group.
Cultural Studies as a field and as practice is necessarily collaborative (as is theatrical practice), interdisciplinary (as are theatre studies), self-reflexive, and (like theatre) site specific. The four are closely related, in part because they all involve or facilitate the demystification and interrogation of boundaries that separate, classify, and (hierarchically) rank ways of producing and deploying knowledges, and they all resist too-simple movements towards generalizations that efface difference.
Cultural Studies is collaborative, in part, because it draws upon different knowledge bases, epistemologies, disciplinary trainings, and societal positionings among the collaborators, resists the naturalizing of individual methods and positions, and resists the inscription of the individual as authority and source of knowledge, shifting the production (and control) of knowledge into the social realm, where it can be negotiated rather than owned. It is collaborative, too, because collaboration allows for a breadth and thickness of knowledge production that is unavailable to individuals working in isolation within an increasingly corporatist and scientized culture of narrow specialization, in which specialized knowledge is produced in isolated environments, outside the realm of the social, in order to be sold to a private sector that determines its (market) value in a consumerist economy.
Cultural Studies is interdisciplinary, not only in order to bring the perspectives of multiple disciplines to bear upon an "object of study," but also in order to denaturalize both disciplinary approaches themselves and the relationships between disciplines and "their" subjects, as a way of destabilizing disciplinary ownership over particular subject areas, and over complex knowledges that have an impact in a broader social realm.
Cultural Studies is self-reflexive, not only about its procedures and practices in relation to its particular project or object of study, but also about the positioning of the researchers, students, and faculty themselves, in relationship to society, to one another, and to the project or object of study itself. This involves constantly foregrounding and problematizing, not only the social, cultural, disciplinary and epistemological differences within the room -- within the group of researchers, practitioners, teachers, and learners -- but also the degrees of authority yielded by these differences in relation to the specific project or object of study. Reflexivity, then, becomes neither self-indulgence nor simple self-awareness, but the site and focus of an ongoing practice of embedding research, practice, teaching, and learning in the social realm.
Finally, Cultural Studies is site-specific, not only in order to allow for both thickness of research or preparation and interdisciplinary breadth, and not only to allow reflexive and specific methods and approaches to be developed in negotiation -- or collaboration -- with the specific projects or object(s) of study, but also to avoid those processes of generalizing or universalizing that efface difference.
II
The study of drama and theatre, at the level of curriculum at least, is necessarily, to a greater or lesser degree, collaborative, interdisciplinary, and site specific. As I have suggested previously, however ("This Discipline"), many drama and theatre programmes in Canada segregate specialized and professionalised "training" in the "practical" disciplines of acting, directing, design, or technical theatre from "education" in the "academic" disciplines of theatre history, criticism, and theory in ways that tend unquestioningly to sever the realms of practice and technique from the realms of values, analysis, and social critique, and to thereby reproduce currently dominant mechanisms of theatrical production and social control.
Among the principles and practices developed by the Pedagogies Working Group at Guelph that might begin to address the problems of collaboration and interdisciplinarity that remain inflected with naturalized power relationships and inequities, and are non-interrogative (in effect, multi- rather than inter-disciplinary), together with the problem of the culturally reproductive practice/theory binary, are the principle of self-reflexivity and the practice, as developed by the Pedagogies Working Group for a core course in the Cultural Studies MA, of team teaching.
Self-reflexivity at the curricular level could involve the development of a programme in which courses in the separate disciplines of acting, directing, design, technical theatre, theatre history, criticism, and theory are not only interrelated through programme requirements and prerequisite structures, allowing students themselves to draw analogies and make connections among the different approaches and epistemologies, as in so many multidisciplinary programmes at Canadian universities, but would bring some or all of them together in specific, team-taught courses at all levels across the curriculum. The primary goals here are to disrupt the practice-theory binary by uncovering the different theoretical principles embedded in various theatrical practices, principles which are often (and often deliberately) mystified in theatrical workshops, rehearsal halls, and acting classrooms, and to develop the practical, material implications and applications of the constructions of theatre history, criticism, and theory, which often function at several removes from the realms of what theatrical practitioners actually do.
One of the core courses in the Cultural Studies curriculum that is being developed by the Pedagogies Working Group at Guelph, and the one that has received most attention from the Group to date,3 is a course in Collaborative Case Study Methodologies, designed to introduce, practise, and reflect upon Cultural Studies collaborative case study methodologies, and to develop site specific, theoretically self-conscious, and thoroughly researched approaches to particular "objects of study." The course is designed explicitly, then, to map method rather than content. It is intended to be team-taught by faculty from different disciplines; the general field of focus in any given offering will be on a specific topic or issue in Cultural Studies; and the approach will involve encounters with a range of disciplinary and cross-disciplinary examples of scholarship that employ case study, together with a mapping of the current state of Cultural Studies approaches to collaborative case study and, crucially, an engagement of students in their own collaborative interdisciplinary case studies. The purpose here is to develop theoretically self-conscious explorations of particular, site-specific, thickly-described cultural moments, while attempting to foreground, for critical reflection, the ideological implications of the course's and the research's own practices of knowledge production (e.g. the processes of selection of material, and its contextualization, interpretation, production, and reception, together with such things as the situatedness of the students and faculty within the process, and issues around the authority of various knowledges and the politics of power relations among the collaborators and within the classroom itself).
The course is designed as a two-semester (24-week) offering, with contact hours "front-and-back loaded," in order to allow enough time for contextualization and self-positioning at the beginning, independent collaborative research, analysis, and reflection in depth in the middle section, and presentation-with-discussion at the end. The first third of the course, then, would involve two three-hour meetings per week, in which students' and faculty members' voices, perspectives, and positionings -- always in relation to the "object of study" of that offering -- would be drawn out, in order to initiate and facilitate the ongoing self-situation, individual and collaborative, of students and faculty with respect to the topic, out of which situatedness the parameters, protocols, and procedures of the course would be to some extent set. The exercise would also initiate reflection on the relationships between self-situation and the collaborative production of knowledge, as well as initiate collective consideration of the various epistemological repertoires, learned skills, cultural positionings, and experiences that students and faculty bring to the group. The course is designed, then, to open with a number of central framing questions, such as: "what don't we know?", "why don't we?", "what do we want to know?", "why do we want to know that?", "how, and in what (shaping) context do we find it out here?", and -- crucially -- "what do we want to do by this knowing?"
The first stage of the course also includes a preliminary mapping of the field, in order both to note relevant extant work and significant absences in that work, to provide a genealogy of the subject, and to critique the protocols of the field as it has shaped up to date. Similarly, the first section involves exploring different disciplinary meanings and methodologies of case study work, attempting to develop a case study methodology that does not imply the unproblematized application of a template, but a development and testing of theory in practice, a way of engaging with felt power relations, and a practice which is self-conscious about its own methodological implications. Here, again, the influence of the learner in the construction of the object of study, and vice versa, will be central to the discussion. Finally, students in the first section of the course will be expected to read "sample" Cultural Studies case studies (taking care that these not reify into "models," or templates), and to negotiate and propose collaborative case studies that will form their research for the remainder of the course and the subjects of their presentations at its conclusion.
The central eight-week section, then, will involve brief weekly meetings of the class for the purpose of sharing problems and discoveries and teasing out general applications from specific experiences. It will also involve occasional consultations between each of the collaborative groups and the instructors, as difficulties and discoveries emerge that are specific to each project. This central section of the course, however, will be comprised primarily of independent collaborative, site-specific research that will ground and complicate questions around the collaborative process, as productive friction emerges among the different epistemological, disciplinary, experiential, and cultural approaches employed.
The final eight-week section of the course, like the first, involves two three-hour class meetings per week, and is designed to allow for the presentation and extensive discussion of each collaborative project, as questions emerge about the relationships between theory and its application, between the positions and interests of the researchers and the results of their research, and about the cultural work performed by that research. A central question in this section might be: "why was that what you discovered here?" This section, and the course, will conclude with a brief period of follow-up and reflection upon the larger implications that may have been suggested about the potentials and limitations of Cultural Studies case study work.4
III
I have rehearsed the Pedagogy Working Group's design for a team-taught, collaborative case study course at some length because I believe it to be suggestive for the teaching of drama and theatre at the university level. Its applications to theatre history, dramatic literature, and theory classes are perhaps most immediately apparent. Among the problems faced in most drama and theatre programmes, for example, is that the range of different approaches -- different disciplines -- to which students are exposed militates against their engaging in significant depth with the problems and protocols of research that takes into account theatre historiography, cultural contextualization, textual analysis, and theoretical self-consciousness -- not to mention careful self-positioning in relation to the class as a whole and to particular objects of study. In a subject area -- theatre -- that is virtually by definition collaborative, moreover, many so-called "academic" classes and programmes adopt as their model that of the individual scholar, working in isolation, and for the most part working within the largely uninterrogated protocols of a single discipline within the larger field of theatre research. These classrooms, then, have tended too often to reify individualism in the academy (together with individual "ownership" of knowledge); to reward the technologies of specialization and isolation; to naturalize the relationship between disciplinary approach and particular subject areas, "scientifically" isolating the various branches of theatrical knowledge production from one another and from their cultural and theatrical environments; and to silently efface difference (and different ways of knowing) in an essentially reproductive economy in which students learn "appropriate" professional modes of scholarly analysis modelled by their (primarily white, male, middle-class, and heterosexual) instructors. They also tend to reinforce rather than problematize the institutionalized capitalist economy of admissions, tuition, assignments, and grading, while creating a closed and professional academic economy in which knowledge circulates within academic disciplines and fields, but has little direct impact on or answerability to the public sphere, including the theatre itself.
A theatre classroom and curriculum that systematically brought together faculty and students with divergent disciplinary, epistemological, and cultural backgrounds and interests, and that focussed on collaborative teaching, learning, and research in a theorized, self-conscious, self-reflexive, and reflective way, on the other hand, could allow for the interrogation of disciplinary, institutional, and other perspectives and protocols, for the intensive and fully contextualized study of thickly described, contextualized, and researched theatrical productions as case studies, and for a collaborative functioning of the theatre studies classroom in ways that more closely approximate the material and necessarily social practices of the theatre itself.
IV
The potentialities of courses such as I am proposing here become even more exciting, however, when extended beyond the realms of theatre history, criticism, and theory classes to those of acting, directing, design, technical theatre, and theatrical organization -- which are now too often taught, again in isolation, as purely "practical," "how-to" courses, training students in the existing protocols and practices of the profession, and purporting, for the most part, to be universally enabling but ideologically neutral. Rarely do such courses require or encourage questions about the ways and degrees to which the training they provide inscribes certain ideological or cultural codings or constructions of subjectivity, or render some kinds of artistic, creative, or interpretative choices more readily available than others -- or indeed precludes certain choices, approaches, or styles. There is evidence, however, to suggest that purportedly apolitical actor training at such places as the National Theatre School are selective at best, and never neutral (Salter); that what is constructed as "freeing" the "natural" voice and body in such training can often function hegemonically to reinforce rather than destabilize or question dominant ideologies (Knowles, "Shakespeare;" Werner); that even approaches to "alternative" acting styles, such as clown, as taught in Canada through methods developed by Jacques Lecoq or the late Richard Pochinko, can function ideologically in their uninterrogated application (Allan); and that acting classes in the United States (and, I would argue, Canada) that attempt to free the body and create a tabula rasa in order to increase its potential expressivity, tend to increase, for example, the frequency of traditional or stereotypically gendered behaviour (Jent 22, 26-7), together with reinforcing the power relationships that accompany them. Similar arguments might be made about the dominant traditions and practices of director, designer, technical, and stage management training.
I would like to suggest that courses modelled on the Cultural Studies Collaborative Case Study course described above could go some distance towards reducing these problems. Courses in acting, directing, design, and technical theatre, of course, are already and almost inevitably collaborative to some degree, and insofar as they tend early on to move towards application they might also be considered to be using "case studies" involving work that is to some degree independent. In fact many of these courses are "front-and-back-loaded" in ways similar to the Cultural Studies Case Study course I've described, in that they begin with studio work that draws out students' positionings, creates a working group dynamic, introduces the field, and establishes the collaborative projects in acting, directing, design, or technical theatre that form the students' work in the courses' middle sections, and the basis of their "presentations" at the end. Such courses also often deal, perforce, with issues central to the Cultural Studies course I have described, issues that revolve around unequal power relationships and skills repertoires among collaborators -- together with differences rooted in class, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and culture. This is particularly evident in exercises that involve improvisation, or that attempt to bypass conscious control and cultural "censoring" to put student actors in touch with "instinctive" -- which in practice often means deeply enculturated -- feelings and responses. While these issues are addressed as they occur in all responsible theatre classrooms, workshops, studios, and labs, the Cultural Studies model of ongoing self-reflexivity, which both foregrounds and interrogates differences and differential power relationships, together with disciplinary protocols and taken-for-granted practices, might serve to demystify and consciously work with different cultural ways of acting, performing, and doing -- treating students, in Henry A. Giroux's terms "as the bearers of diverse social memories" ("Is There a Place?" 42) -- and encourage reflection about the relationships among theory, method, practice, and reception in the material theatre.
One of the most useful things that might be adapted from the Cultural Studies Case Study course to the requirements of practical theatre training at Canadian universities is a version of the questions that frame that course. It might be salutary, that is, to begin such courses by asking "what don't we know how to do?", "why don't we?", "what do we want to do?", "why do we want to do that?", "how, and in what (shaping) context can we learn to do that here?", and -- crucially -- "what cultural work do we want this doing to accomplish?" Similarly, the course might end by exploring "why was that what we were able to do here?" While it is clearly useful or even necessary in many theatre classes, particularly acting classes, to set intellectual analysis temporarily aside, the framing and punctuating of such courses with such questions would encourage, not only recognition of the (cultural, institutional, and professional) parameters within which faculty and students are working, but also attempt to develop new, site-specific and purpose-built approaches and techniques in order to accomplish new or different ends, including the creation of social agency among students as theatre practitioners, and the promotion of social change.
V
The logical extension of my argument, of course, involves a return to the question of interdisciplinary collaboration in the theatre classroom and curriculum, and to bring to bear on one another at certain nodal points in the curriculum a full range of practical and academic theatrical disciplines, on the principle, again, that theory must always be practised and practice theorized. This, of course, involves interdisciplinary team teaching, in which student actors, for example, learn not only to engage with particular methods, techniques, and schools, but also learn by reading a range of acting theories, and by analyzing, historicising, and interrogating the explicit, implicit, or naturalized cultural and ideological projects of different approaches and methods. Similarly, theatre historians and drama critics and theorists might learn by being forced to keep theatrical processes in view, and to keep the multiple possibilities, inevitable contingencies, and determined materiality of the "practical" in mind. Students in this model would learn to "experience and define what it means to be cultural producers capable of both reading different texts and producing them, of moving in and out of theoretical discourses but never losing sight of the need to theorize for themselves" (Giroux "Slacking Off" 74-5).
Some of this happens already, of course, particularly in small-scale liberal arts drama programmes such as those at Mount Allison University or Glendon College (see Shand), or, differently, at McMaster University. In such programmes, usually within an "academic" context in "Drama Studies" within an English Department or a larger unit of Drama, Music, and Fine Arts (or some variation on these groupings), "Drama-in-Production" courses study play scripts from different (theatre) historical periods in the context of mounting productions on which students work as actors, directors, dramaturges, designers, and technicians. Such courses are excellent, as far as they go, as are other experiments in bringing scripts -- and the material realities of producing them -- to life in otherwise more conventional dramatic literature classrooms. Also excellent are attempts by more traditionally pre-professional theatre programmes to engage students in dramaturgical, theatre-historical, and analytical exercises (the results of which are often circulated in collaboratively-produced programme notes) around productions on which they are working. But rarely are such efforts applied systematically and interrogatively across a full and integrated Drama/Theatre curriculum.
What follows, then, is an attempt to design and explain the principles behind a sample upper-level, double-weighted5 university course revolving around the planning and practice of, and reflection upon, the mounting of a production. The project for any given year would be chosen by an elected committee of faculty and senior students, and an attempt would be made over any four-year period to do productions emerging from different historical and cultural contexts. The course would be restricted to Drama/Theatre students who had already taken interrogative courses, such as those described above, in theatre history, criticism and theory, acting, directing, design, and technical theatre. It would attempt to conceive of the classroom/rehearsal hall as a site of social negotiation, where a sophisticated version of Augusto Boal's "rehearsal of revolution" (141) might lead to the development of socially engaged and culturally productive (vs professionally and socially reproductive) theatrical practices and pedagogies.
SAMPLE COURSE OUTLINE
PURPOSE: To develop, practise, and reflect upon a process for the mounting of an historicized theatrical production in a Canadian university setting.
The course is "about" the process itself, but is focussed in each offering on a particular theatrical production. The production will be historicized in the sense that it will involve students in examining the historical (cultural and theatrical) conditions and complex negotiations in and through which the script and/or production text were first produced and first produced their meanings, and in the sense that the course's own production practices will be self-conscious, and will involve students in the active historicization of the present. Even in cases in which the script in production is contemporary and Canadian, the different local, theatrical, and economic conditions relating to (say) professional as opposed to academic contexts of production will be "historicized." The point here is partly to avoid eliding different cultural, theatrical, and historical conditions in a fuzzy universalism, and partly to provide opportunities for students to discover such things as the social, cultural, and historical construction of bodies, voices, social relations, epistemologies, and "perspectives."
APPROACH: The course will be coordinated by a team of faculty members from different disciplines in the field of theatre studies, and will draw upon the different knowledges, cultures, genders, experience, and interests of those faculty and of the students enroled in each offering. It will attempt at every stage to develop theatrical processes and practices out of the foregrounded positionings of the faculty and students, and will at every level also foreground for reflection the ideological and other implications of those practices and processes, including the ways in which they delimit choice and shape meaning.
The purpose here, of course, is to develop theatrical processes appropriate to the negotiated needs, wishes, and positionalities of the group in a specific place and time, rather than apply pre-existing, naturalized methods. It is also to develop in students and faculty alike self-consciousness about differing goals, objectives, and cultural assumptions, to foreground the negotiated nature of collaborative research and practice, and to highlight the inter-imbricated nature of theory and practice.
ADMISSION: Admission to the course is restricted to students who have completed a range of prerequisites in all areas of the curriculum (theatre history, criticism, theory, acting, directing, design, technical theatre, and theatrical organization), and who have completed third-year courses in at least two of those areas, on which they will work in the production. Actors in the production will be admitted by audition, and students working in other capacities by proposal, interview, or submission of a portfolio, as appropriate. Admission to the course will be decided by a committee consisting of the team of faculty members coordinating the course, plus senior students elected from among the student body who are not applying for admission to the course -- preferably students who have already taken it. An attempt will be made in the selection process (of faculty and students) to create as diverse a group as possible.
Clearly the admission process is one in which power differentials and institutional constraints surface unavoidably. While decisions such as those articulated here must be negotiated and made, it will be important in the early stages of the course to draw attention to and interrogate the ways in which these differentials and constraints have played themselves out in the constitution of the class.
DESIGN: Two semesters (24 weeks). The course will normally be divided into two parts, the first devoted to negotiating and engaging in collaborative research and in the planning of the production process, and the second to mounting and reflecting upon the production itself.
It is assumed that there will be sufficient flexibility for the overall course design to be the subject of negotiation among the faculty and students in the early stages of each offering, in relation to the specific project and the particulars of the group, and within the context of site-specific institutional constraints. Like the rehearsal and production process itself, then, the processes and practices of the course will be part of its subject matter.
PART I: (First Semester)
UNIT 1 (2 weeks, 6 hours per week): Collaboration: Positions and Practices
The first unit of the course will draw out students' and faculty members' voices, perspectives, and positionings out of which the parameters and procedures of the course will be to some extent set. It will open with the questions listed above about what we want to do here, why we want to do it, how we might do it here, and what we want to achieve by this doing -- what cultural work we want the course, the rehearsal process, and the production to perform. Part of the purpose here is to initiate and facilitate the ongoing self-situation, individual and collaborative, of the group in relation to one another and to the current project; to initiate collective consideration of the various disciplinary skills involved in researching and mounting a production, and the various epistemological repertoires, cultural positionings, backgrounds and experiences that students and faculty bring to the project; and to reflect upon how all of these, and the power relationships among them, impact upon the decision-making process and the resultant rehearsal process and production.
UNIT 2 (3 weeks, 6 hours per week): Resources
Unit 2 will involve identifying the resources of various kinds available to the group, including, initially, research materials on the cultural and theatrical contexts in and through which the original script and/or production text was produced and received, including relationships among various cultural (including theatrical) forms, both expressive and material. The purpose here is to enable subsequent historicizing of the original production synchronically in order to expose the relationships among the social construction of bodies and subjectivities in particular places and times through such things as architecture, furniture and fashion, geography, economic and social structures and relations, and historical discourses of power and authority, labour, class, race, gender, sexuality, and knowledge production. A similar exercise will be applied diachronically to the stage history, if any, and accumulated traditions associated with the play in production over time. Crucial to this section will be noting and explicating significant absences in source materials, and in the historical record, in each of these areas.
Also included in this section will be the determination, allocation, and interrogation of financial, material, infrastructural, institutional, and personnel resources available to the class for mounting the production, which will also involve noticing the significance, historical and current, of particular differentials, availabilities, and restrictions of access to such resources. Again, a similar exercise will involve the repertoire of known and available techniques and practices in each area of the production (i.e. approaches to acting, directing, design, and technical theatre, as well as to the structuring, physical and temporal, of rehearsal processes, stage management practices, publicity and front-of-house procedures in a university setting), noting and explicating, again, significant absences in that repertoire.
Near the end of this unit, the collaborators and collaborative projects emerging from this preparatory work, which will be the focus of Unit 3, will be negotiated and proposed. Each collaborative research group will involve students from as diverse disciplinary and other perspectives as possible, working on different aspects of the production.
UNIT 3 (4 weeks, independent collaborative research, informal consultations with faculty, one hour per week of formal, full-class contact): Research and Consultation
Each collaborative research group will engage in thickly-researched description and engaged analysis of some aspect of either the original cultural moment of production or of the immediate production context, including the positioning of the class itself and its individual members in relation to the script or project that is the focus of the course. It is hoped that the specificities of particular projects in this unit will begin to ground and complicate the questions raised in Unit 2, that productive friction will emerge among different epistemologies and different disciplinary and experiential approaches employed, and that the collaborative research process will expose the complex ideological relationships involved in historical and contemporary theatrical production, as well as the historical contingency of theatrical meanings and the practices of making history and culture.
UNIT 4 (3 weeks, 6 hours per week): Research Group Presentation and Discussion
It is hoped that questions will emerge in this unit about the relationships in research between theory and practice, historiography and history; about the relationships between the positions and interests of the researcher-practitioners and the results of their work; and about the cultural work performed by their research. Central to the discussions here will be the question of why those particular researchers discovered/produced what they did here and now.
PART II (Second Semester)
UNIT 5 (10 weeks, rehearsals, production process, performance, plus 1 hour per week formal class meetings): Mounting the Production
The weekly one-hour meetings of the full company/class in this unit will serve as fora for communication. It is hoped that self-consciousness will emerge here about why the production is developing in the particular ways that it is, and about the array of shaping factors framing and delimiting artistic choices, negotiations, and compromises. These shaping factors include, of course, the ways in which power relationships and differentials between faculty and faculty, faculty and students, students and students, and among faculty and students working in different capacities on the production are evolving in the workshop, rehearsal hall, and classroom. These meetings are also designed to serve the ongoing processes of self-positioning of the participants, and the ongoing process of historicising the (shifting) present.
UNIT 6 (2 weeks, 6 hours per week): Follow up, Reflection, and Moving to the General
The course will end with a two-week period of follow-up and reflection following the closing of the production, asking, for example, "why did we produce what we did here and now?", "what cultural work did our process and our production perform?", and "what meanings did the audience produce, and why?" Crucial here will be the noting and analysis of gaps between original plans and actual practices, and between original goals and actual results. This section will also ask what larger implications might have been suggested by this process about the nature of theatrical collaboration and production, the relationships between theory and practice in theatre studies, and the role of theatrical production as cultural intervention.
ASSIGNMENTS: In addition to working on the production in their various capacities in acting, directing, design, technical theatre, stage management, publicity, and so on in the second semester, students will be required to take part in one major collaborative research project and seminar report in semester one, to take part in all discussions, planning and feedback sessions and analyses throughout the course, and to write a brief, analytical follow-up paper in response to some of the questions raised in Unit 6, including an assessment of the cultural work performed by the process and by the production itself.
EVALUATION: As a senior project in an academic programme in which numerical or letter grades are rewarded for all other courses and assignments, this course will operate on a Pass/Fail basis, with feedback provided at regular intervals throughout the course.
Here, again, institutional constraints and the material realities resulting from institutionalized power differentials come most openly into play. While students need to receive grades in order to proceed beyond the undergraduate university setting to further education or employment, consciousness of grading, and of the power and exchange relationships that grading involves in Canadian university settings, would militate against the proper functioning, not only of the rehearsal hall, where an atmosphere of trust is essential, but also of self-positioning and reflexivity at every level within the group. Any grading scheme, therefore, is the necessary result of compromise and negotiation that, nevertheless, need not be mystified or denied, but should be taken into account as part of the course's foregrounding of power differentials in the classroom.
VI
The curricular model and course outline that I have proposed here represent an effort to ground the principles of alternative pedagogies in the practice of a proposed Theatre Studies programme at a Canadian university in this pre-millennial period of late capitalism. The specificities of the course I have proposed as a sample, of course, would vary among institutions and with each offering at any given site. It is clear, too, that no outline can address the specific types of productive and counterproductive friction that might emerge in the negotiation and application of difference in each class. The course outline I have proposed, for example, fails to address the question of auditions and casting: clearly some offerings of the course would allow for the conditions of casting to be determined by the class itself, as issues of type casting, the appropriateness of the casting of a smooth ensemble, of colour- or gender-blind casting or cross-gender casting, and of the relationship between actor, character, and role emerged. Other offerings of the course, however, would no doubt both benefit and suffer from "pre-casting" by a faculty or student director or directorial team before the course begins and offers of admission are made, casting that might then become one of many pre-determinants to be analyzed and commented upon. But disturbances such as these in the veneer of the course outline can, I suggest, serve as productive sites of a wide range of self-reflexive discussions and analyses in the course itself which, because it issues in public performance, must necessarily make practical choices and live, however uncomfortably on occasion, with the consequences of those choices.
No curricular or course design is perfect, nor should any planning preclude improvisations, shapings, refinements, and revisionings that derive from the specific make-up of the class, the specific production, and the development and evolution of the rehearsal and production process in each offering. This is particularly true of a course such as this one that concerns itself primarily with the teaching of method rather than its specific content. The essential features, in fact, of a socially engaged, self-reflexive, site-specific, thoroughly theorized and contextualized, culturally productive and antihegemonic drama and theatre pedagogical practice remain its insistence that the theatre studies classroom exist within a determinate social, historical, and cultural context, and that the materials and objects of study of any course or programme must always be, in part, the students and faculty in self-conscious negotiation with one another and with the particulars of the project that they undertake. It is for this reason that Theatre Studies can learn a great deal from the collaborative, interdisciplinary, self-reflexive, and site specific theories and practices of Alternative and Cultural Studies pedagogies.
NOTES
1 This article was inspired and shaped by the deliberations
of the faculty, graduate and undergraduate student members of the Pedagogies
Seminar, and later the Pedagogies Working Group of the Centre for Cultural
Studies, convened by Donna Palmateer Pennee since the Spring of 1996. Parts
one and two are digests of the results of several meetings of the group
over 1996-7, and together with parts of the introductory paragraphs, may
be considered to have been collaboratively written by Christine Bold, Melisa
Brittain, Sabina Chatterjee, Ajay Heble, Maryanne Kaay, Richard Paul Knowles,
Jeannie Martin, Donna Palmateer Pennee, and Gillian Siddall. There has
also been broader participation and input from, in particular, Cherry Clayton,
Al Lauzon, Mary Elizabeth Leighton, and Howard Spring. The remainder of
the article is my own attempt to apply some of the principles articulated
by the group to the teaching of Drama and Theatre. A version of this paper
was presented in Windsor, Ontario in the Fall of 1997 as the inaugural
talk in the White-Hammond lecture series of the Council of Ontario University
and College Theatre Programmes.
Return to Article
2 Most of these texts dedicated to what I am calling "alternative pedagogies" derive from the work of Paulo Freire, particularly his Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Education for Critical Consciousness, and the tradition of "critical pedagogy" that is perhaps best represented by the work of Henry A. Giroux, Peter McLaren, and bell hooks. The "presuppositions" of this tradition are usefully summarized by Peter McLaren:
[P]edagogies constitute a form of social and cultural criticism; all knowledge is fundamentally mediated by linguistic relations that inescapably are socially and historically constituted; individuals are synecdochically related to the wider society through traditions of mediation (family, friends, religion, formal schooling, popular culture, etc.); social facts can never be isolated from the domain of values or removed from forms of ideological production as inscription; the relationship between concept and object and signifier and signified is neither inherently stable nor transcendentally fixed and is often mediated by circuits of capitalist production, consumption, and social relations; language is central to the formation of subjectivity (conscious and unconscious awareness); certain groups in any society are unnecessarily and often unjustly privileged over others and while the reason for this privileging may vary widely, the oppression which characterizes contemporary societies is most forcefully secured when subordinates accept their social status as natural, necessary, inevitable or bequeathed to them as an exercise of historical chance; oppression has many faces and focusing on only one at the expense of others (e.g., class oppression vs. racism) often elides or occults the interconnection among them; power and oppression cannot be understood simply in terms of an irrefutable calculus of meaning linked to cause and effect conditions and this means that an unforseen world of social relations awaits us; domination and oppression are implicated in the radical contingency of social development and our responses to it; and mainstream research practices are generally and unwittingly implicated in the reproduction of systems of class, race, and gender oppression. (125-6)
McLaren, however, is careful to point out that Freire:
does not see individuals and groups to be agentless beings invariably trapped in and immobilized by language [and other] effects. Rather human beings are politically accountable for their language [and other] practices and as such, agency is considered immanent. (127)
He concludes, with Gramsci, that "the structural intentionality of human beings needs to be critically interrogated through a form of conscientization" (Ibid.). See also Lankshear, Peters, and Knobel's review and critique of critical pedagogies (150-57). For brief reviews of work on Cultural Studies in education, see Peters & Lankshear 29-30, Giroux 43-4, and Grossberg.
The reading of the Pedagogies Working Group at Guelph focussed initially
on the following texts: Giroux and McLaren, eds., Between Borders,
particularly the articles by Lawrence Grossberg and Chandra Talpede Mohanty;
Eber Hampton, "Toward a Redefinition of Indian Education"; bell hooks,
Teaching to Transgress, particularly the Introduction and the essay
"Engaged Pedagogy"; Maureen McNeil, "It Ain't Like Any Other Teaching";
Ellen Rooney, "Discipline and Vanish"; the nine essays in Isaiah Smithson
and Nancy Ruff, eds., English Studies/Cultural Studies; Stephen
Sleman and Joanne Wallace, "Into the heart of darkness?"; and Patricia
Williams, "Talking about Race, Talking about Gender, Talking about How
We Talk." I am also drawing here on the various essays in Giroux, Lankshear,
McLaren, & Peters, Counternarratives: Cultural Studies and Critical
Pedagogies in Postmodern Spaces.
Return to Article
3 The others deal with the histories of disciplinarity
and interdisciplinarity, and with the university and the public sphere.
The developing MA curriculum also includes a research project, which may
or may not be collaborative, and may or may not take the form of traditional
academic work, and may emerge from any one of the three core courses.
Return to Article
4 A major issue for discussion among the Pedagogies
Working Group, of particular concern to its student members, was the grading
of this work. How does one grade collaborative work? How does one resist
taking part in the fundamentally capitalist economy of grading at Canadian
universities without deprivileging students who may wish to proceed to
Doctoral work (including scholarship and fellowship applications) within
the academy? It has been tentatively concluded that this course will be
graded on a Pass/Fail basis, while other courses in the programme, and
the final research paper, will receive conventional numerical or letter
grades.
Return to Article
5 By double-weighted I mean two credits of twenty required
for a four-year honours degree, or four credits in a forty-credit degree.
Return to Article
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