Embracing the “Foggy Place” of Theatre History: The Chautauqua/Colloquia Model of Public Scholarship as Performance

In her December 2013 Slate polemic “The End of the College Essay: An Essay,” Rebecca Schuman calls for the end of assigning and grading papers in required courses. Since “the baccalaureate is the new high-school diploma” and “students (and their parents) view college as professional training,” professors should “declare unconditional defeat” and abandon the dated notion that writing essays is a necessary part of a decent undergraduate education.¹ As a theatre historian with training in rhetoric and composition, I have incorporated numerous student-centered writing strategies in theatre history, literature, and theory courses, but ultimately I have taken a similar stance when discussing departmental curricula with my colleagues: I question the value of traditional (that is, reader-oriented and paper-based) research/writing assignments within the major.

For those of us who teach “book” courses for theatre majors, a frequent obstacle we face is that our classes do not offer opportunities for public performance and therefore (to many students, as well as colleagues) the value of what we teach can be invisible.² When the department curriculum includes history/theory courses, they are often upper-division classes with substantial writing components, exacerbating the divide between practice-oriented curricula and the scholarly coursework required for theatre majors. However, at the root of this assumed divide is a limited and limiting notion of writing that is at odds with theatrically savvy students and teachers: in this divide, students write for readers, and teachers grade papers. At both Kennesaw State University (KSU) and the University of Kansas (KU) I piloted an entirely different approach wherein students wrote for performance, and I graded presentations.

In other words, at the root of the question I pose here (and I suspect Schuman’s indignation) is a frustration with the disconnection between traditional academic writing and critical thinking. Several recent studies indicate the decline of attentive reading in the age of digital skimming and bemoan the 140-character limits of the Twitter generation’s prose; some of this research suggests that students are losing the ability to write as the basis of critical thinking.³ On the flip side, the evidence culled from the Stanford Study of Writing has provided an alternate narrative: that twenty-first-century students are writing more than ever before, but that they prefer “self-sponsored” writing, or writing for/as performance. To quote one of the students involved with this study, Beth McGregor: “For me, the force of the embodied performance is unparalleled by the written word” (Fishman et al. 238). Especially within a program based on live performance, the assumption that reader-based prose is the best way to assess theatre studies seems obviously misplaced. As students advance in scholarship, writing papers for reading audiences becomes a valuable undertaking, and for most graduate students this traditional approach still has merit; but for today’s undergraduate theatre majors, if we want to engage their intellectual curiosity (and preserve our own sanity) we must approach scholarship as a public performance.

This approach is anything but new—it harkens back to the ancient world with its emphasis on oratory—but it is more locally grounded in the American tradition of Chautauqua presentations, and thus I call my theatre history research/writing project the “Chautauqua/Colloquium.” Over the past decade I have held these events at least once each semester, and each time I did so I learned from my mistakes and successes and continued to refine the project. In what follows, I will provide an overview of the historical and pedagogical rationale for oral/aural learning, followed by a summary of the specific assignment and its process, and ending with an analysis of the assessment data from both faculty and students. In so doing, I hope to demonstrate the ways in which the oral performance of scholarship can enhance the effectiveness and enjoyment of the scholarly theatre classroom.

The Chautauqua Approach/Tradition

The definition of the word Chautauqua remains a matter of some debate, since the word derives from American Indian (specifically Seneca) usage. Geographically speaking, Chautauqua Lake in New...