Modeling Meaning-Making in Introductory Theatre Studies: Auto-Ethnography as Explicit Instruction

Since 2008, I have been teaching a large (100–120 students), one-term Introduction to Theatre course, whose goal is to teach . . . I am still not sure what. When I first inherited the course it was a lecture survey perceived as a recruiting tool for the drama program at my technology-oriented institution—the University of Waterloo—as well as an outreach tool for the program, since many students from the science, mathematics, and engineering faculties were taking it to fulfill degree-program requirements for courses outside of their major disciplines. It might have been a theatre “appreciation” course, if appreciation could be aligned loosely with “information” and “enjoyment.” Then again, the course also needed to introduce humanities research, writing, critical-thinking, and academic-integrity skills. These tend to crowd out some of the space devoted to information in a traditional lecture survey and rarely contribute to anyone’s anticipation of enjoyment. To complicate matters further, since this was a required course for aspiring drama majors, it was also supposed to teach foundational knowledge that would prepare students for further study in the discipline. It looked like a recipe for failure: take something students think they will enjoy, ruin it for them, and tell them that this is what it means to study theatre.

Over the last four academic years, as I have struggled with the course, I have been confronted again and again with three questions: What is foundational knowledge in theatre studies? How does it align with the scholarly skills that we teach across arts and humanities departments at the undergraduate level? And how can we teach this, whatever it is, to students whose interests and expectations seem less and less compatible with our own? These are not new problems: a survey of the last five years’ issues of Theatre Topics shows scholars’ struggles with them from a variety of perspectives, including, just to name a few, Amy Steiger’s article on critical pedagogy; Shelley Manis’s piece on using performance to teach writing; Monica Prendergast’s on audience education; and Ronald Wainscott’s on introductory theatre courses. My own attempts to answer these questions have led to a number of experimental activities in what can no longer be called a lecture-survey course. Most of these activities have failed. One exercise, however, in which I ask students to write about a theatre experience that has affected them, has been successful for both my students and me; that is, as I have refined the exercise year by year, students have demonstrated increasingly better skills, and I have significantly enriched my thinking about the work that an Introduction to Theatre course needs to do, and the ways by which that work can be accomplished. The task is relatively straightforward: “Write a 600–800 word essay, supported by two or three concrete pieces of correctly acknowledged evidence, explaining how a theatrical experience of your choice has affected you.” Yet for many students it was unachievable in the first year I assigned it; by the third year nearly half of the essays submitted earned grades in the “A” range.¹ What had changed was the way I presented the assignment: as a result of rethinking who my students were and what they needed to know I began to model, through demonstration and self-narrative, the means of completing the assignment.

I am reporting here both on the development of the exercise and also on the new approach to pedagogy that it has required of me, an approach I now think of as an “auto-ethnographical” version of what is more broadly termed “explicit instruction.” These terms are still in quotation marks for me, because I have only recently learned them. Explicit instruction usually refers to the pedagogical strategy of explicitly describing the principle you are teaching, and then working through examples with students in which the principle is applied. Explicit instruction is a method of teaching I am familiar with from my own early education, but auto-ethnography, which involves personal narrative and self-reflection, is not. I am still not sure...