The Year That Was, 2016: What Happened When the Students Created the Supplementary Course Reader and Set Their Own Deadlines

Back in May 2015 I wrote three reflective posts about the academic year just passed: what worked, what didn’t, what I hoped to do differently in 2015-16. This year, instead of following that formula, I’ve decided to report on two of the changes I implemented. One went substantially better than I thought it might – though there’s room for improvement, as you’ll see – and the other kind of tanked, in a way I didn’t anticipate – though in hindsight I totally get it, and managed to salvage it nevertheless.

1. Students Create the Supplementary Course Reader

Last year, my teaching assistant for my 20th Century Theatre course, Madison Bettle, built an amazing tool for us all: a reader on our website designed to fill in some of the historical, cultural, and political gaps in student knowledge that we might not get to (or get to fully) in class. Labelled the “supplementary course reader”, Maddie’s tool was a hit with students, who reported using it constantly to prepare for class, essays, and exams. When she reflected on the reader’s popularity, however, she noted that it was a bit too one-way for her liking: it was content delivery online, which meant it also smacked of the kind of passive learning we both like to avoid. She suggested perhaps students ought to be involved in the reader’s creation, as well as its downloading, in future years, and I eagerly took up that suggestion.

This year, 20th Century Theatre began with a visit from Maddie, who explained the supplementary course reader’s construction and purpose to the new cohort; this information complemented the course reader assignment description I’d set out in the syllabus. Students were responsible for creating two course reader entries over the year, one per term; they could choose the weeks they would contribute, as well as the topics they’d write about, or they could suggest their own topics. Each contribution was worth 5%, and I purposefully designed the task so that it would be fairly easy for a committed but not necessarily gifted student to achieve 5/5. Students needed to tick 5 boxes, from being on time with their draft submission to me, to covering some basic content bases, to editing their draft in accordance with my suggestions and uploading their final draft to our website; they did not need to create something perfect, nor indeed essay-like. The purpose of the reader, I stressed, was to contribute to our shared understanding of the periods and cultures under discussion in class, not to make an argument or demonstrate exceptional grammar skills. Newsy posts were good; so were photos and videos, plus useful links in the Works Cited. It was fine to start with Wikipedia, but not a good idea to stop there. To assist students confused by this (admittedly somewhat unique) assignment, I created a model entry for the first week and talked us through it in class. I also made a point of drawing attention (in a good way) to the first couple of posts made by students in September.

[You can take a look at our crowd-sourced supplementary course reader here.]

The pros? My god, the students were on the ball about this. Maybe a quarter of the time did I have to remind them to get me drafts on the Monday afternoon before the week’s classes; once I’d done so they were immediately responsive, and of course by that point I’d already read and commented on the work submitted by students ahead of the game. I found it really important to vet the drafts; I hadn’t realised until the first wave of work came in that the draft editing stage was my opportunity to arrest any egregious mistakes that probably ought not to be published on the web. (Although the class’s WordPress site was designed not to be easily searchable by bots or trolls, it was nevertheless public.) At the same time, though, the students were clearly making valuable contributions to our collective knowledge as a class, and I also used my read of their first drafts to encourage them to augment ideas, both with text and with supporting images and videos.

The cons are all down to me. In fact there’s really just one big con: I was so busy imagining this assignment and creating the scaffolding for students to contribute to the reader that I forgot entirely to think about how the reader could be used, actively, in class or toward future assignments. I often pointed at the week’s contributions in class, noting whenever possible links to our discussions or to my or my TA’s pocket lectures; I don’t think that was enough, however, and I felt at year’s end like all that great material was just sitting there on the website, underused. I did not – again, not really thinking enough about application! – ask the students on the mid-year survey how the course reader contributed to their weekly prep, nor did the stats WordPress offers give me enough information about who used the course reader page when. (Maddie’s reader was exceptionally well used because she was an instructor on the course; I’d really like to know to what extent students were willing to use one another’s work as authoritative. My guess is: less than I’d hope, more than I fear.)

So, while I’ll certainly keep this assignment for future iterations of the course, I’ll give a great deal more thought next time to how its materials will apply to student learning outcomes overall, and I’ll poll the students actively on how they use the course reader materials. I’ll probably also design a larger, capstone assignment for the course with the reader in mind.

2. Students Set Their Own Deadlines

Still in 20th Century Theatre, I decided to hand power to each student to decide when they/she/he would hand in the theatre review assignment, as well as the major research essay assignment. In the first case, we took two field trips to see shows in Toronto, one in November and one in January, and students had the option to review either show, handing in reviews the week after the field trip. In the second case, students were given a roster of dates to pick from in March and early April, and could hand in their research essays on any of the three, provided they selected their due date in advance. We chose dates together before Reading Week, when our research librarian Melanie Mills came to speak to the class about time management. The rule was that students could ask for “extensions” on their original deadlines up to and including the final suggested due date, as long as those extensions were requested before their chosen deadline rolled around. Plus, a bonus for anyone handing in on the first or second suggested date: feedback from both me and my TA Meghan, plus a chance to “do over” for a better grade.

I – VERY naively, clearly! – assumed students would take full responsibility for their learning as a result of this process, and hand stuff in according to the schedules they set for themselves. Students often complain to me that their stuff in my class is due the same week as everyone else’s class’s stuff; I figured if I gave them the option of picking their own due dates, and encouraged them to look at their schedules and think in advance about how to balance their assignments, they’d nail it AND stop complaining to boot.

Um. Ya. Yup. Right.

It turns out students are way human, and procrastinate about their own self-imposed deadlines exactly as well as I do. Loads of them picked the first deadline; by the end, only two or three of 25 actually handed in that day. (Similarly, while everyone professed the best of intentions with the theatre review assignment, only two students reviewed the November performance.) They came to me shame-faced, asking if they could extend; true to my word, I granted them the extensions requested, and could only commiserate with them about how hard it is to stick to a deadline you impose on yourself. When the advantages are theoretical (I can party AFTER I hand in!) and the consequences limited… well, we all kind of suck at sticking to our word.

In the end, though, the abject failure of the set-your-own-deadline task was saved beautifully by a meta-assignment I attached to the research essay. Students were invited to keep a time management journal, writing at least four entries in it reflecting on how the preparation for their research essays was going (and on how they were doing at sticking to their deadlines). The return was golden: create a time-management plan (in class with me and Melanie at the start of the process), write the entries, and hand in with your research essay’s final draft, and you’d be rewarded with a bonus 5% on top of your essay mark, no strings attached.

To my surprise, students DID keep the journals. (Admittedly, I offered short bursts of time in class on occasion to write entries, guaranteeing a certain amount of buy-in.) And in keeping them, they took a surprising amount of time and space to reflect on what went wrong when they failed to keep to their originally chosen deadlines. The TM task, in other words, allowed students to confront their bad time management habits directly, and to think carefully about why they had not managed to take full advantage of the opportunity to set their own, more effective, deadlines for the research essay. While I would have liked to see students better use their time to begin with and hand in early for the do-over opportunity, I was really glad to read so many honest, forthright self-analyses, evidence that, at the very least, I got students thinking about how much their schedule chaos is down to their own making, rather than their profs’ tendencies to, you know, schedule final assignments at the end of term.

(Plus, it’s kind of a relief to know that your prof is also great at procrastinating, and is constantly working on that … I wasn’t shy about sharing this all-too-human reality with them, either.)

So I think I’ll use the choose-your-own-adventure deadline option again too – though this time primarily to watch students realise, along with me, how hard it is to work effectively within so much freedom. Something tells me that’s the best lesson to learn, and to learn early.

Kim

 

On flipping the theatre studies classroom… back again (part 2)

My last post reported on a workshop I recently co-organized with my colleagues Natalie Alvarez and Jenn Stephenson at the CATR annual conference in Calgary. The premise of the workshop was simple: it gathered teachers of theatre and performance history, asked us to think about the benefits of the “flipped classroom” model for our courses, and encouraged us to share our ongoing experiments in active learning.

Lots of great insights emerged, and I learned a bunch of terrific new things. We also, however, used the opportunity of the workshop to air some grievances about flipping, and the second half of our session turned into a really provocative discussion about the politics of the flipped classroom.

In this (second) post on the workshop I reflect on that discussion, and I end with some thoughts about the place (or lack thereof) of arts and humanities voices in the broader discourse around flipping.

***

We’d shared our research, talked about Grahame and Jenn’s blended learning experiences at Queen’s, and 90 minutes had come and gone. We took a break, and when we resumed it was time to talk about challenges we’ve encountered with the flipped model. (God, does Moodle ever suck! And students are crap at posting to WordPress.)

That’s when one of our auditors raised her hand and said…

“How is assigning readings beforehand, and discussing them together in class, different from ‘flipping’ the classroom?”

Then we all burst into fits of giggles, nods – and tears. (Well, not literally. But almost!)

What’s a flipped classroom? It’s a classroom in which students come having done pre-prep, reading or listening to content in advance. It’s a classroom where various kinds of group discussions and problem-solving activities take place, live, between us. It’s a classroom in which students are invited actively to engage in knowledge production, to use their embodied minds to test ideas on their feet, and to work collaboratively to challenge status-quo assumptions.

In other words: it’s a typical arts and humanities classroom.

More than that, in fact: it’s a very typical theatre and performance studies classroom.

It’s not every A&H / T&P classroom, of course: I’m not suggesting that rote instruction, lecturing, and gob-smackingly boring sage-on-stage stuff doesn’t happen in the arts. On the contrary: I was subject to plenty of it myself when I was an undergraduate student, and I have seen it in more than one classroom I’ve peer-assessed as a tenured professor.

But let’s face it. Arts and humanities teachers invented the flipped classroom, and theatre and performance, along with all the other fine arts practices taught at college and university level, pioneered embodied learning. Whether we’re talking vigorous class debate about medical ethics on display in a contemporary British lit class discussing Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday, improvisation in a directing class exploring the fate of the murdered wife Desdemona in Othello, or experiments with found objects in a creative writing class focused on contemporary poetry, the pedagogical basis is the same. Student labour is framed as thinking, writing, speaking, and sharing in the room on the day. It often involves in-class collaboration. It regularly involves play. There’s often a chance to report back, to create something to share, or at the very least to get up and move around.

Which is why our workshop quickly moved on from sharing our (rather dry) findings from the flipped classroom “lit review” that opened our session to sharing best practices already in our collective teaching repertoire. As Jacqueline Taucar helpfully observed, we need to ask whether it’s the “flipped classroom” – the shiny new model, complete with how-to kit – that gets results, or the active learning component at the heart of the flipped classroom that really fires students up.

Our hunch was the latter. And around the table, numerous terrific (and fun!) examples of great active learning exercises came to light.

• Jenn talked about her first-year theatre history students exploring the concept of “historiography” in a practical way as they worked in teams to compare and contrast the assumptions framing two different chapters in their textbook;
• Martin Julien shared a task that saw students interviewing one another about their understandings of feminism, then reporting to the class on their findings;
• Tony Vickery wowed us all with a description of his performance studies class on fantasy and cosplay, where students build their own board games (strictly low-tech!) and then play one another’s offerings to test their effectiveness. (The board games are all based on one or two of the theories/practices read for class);
• Marlis Schweitzer shared our colleague Richie Wilcox’s hilarious scheme for teaching complex performance theory, in which students get to create a retelling of a well-known fairy tale in the style of a theory “ism”. (Little Marxist Riding Hood: bring it on!)

Notably, virtually all of these examples involved minimal or no technology.

So why, you must now be wondering, did we all get together to talk about “flipping” our classrooms if we’re already experts and our teaching practice is already flip-friendly?

The answer is simple, frustrating, and symptomatic:

Because what we have long been doing has now got a name, outcome stats, administrative momentum, and a budget line.

We’ve all been told from above that this thing called “flipping” is something we need to know about. Students are consumers, and we need to offer best practices that lead to strong outcomes. (Duh.) Data (typically based on teaching in the sciences, which has recently discovered flipping and wants to share it with us) shows active learning works better than passive learning. So we’ve been instructed by our resident teaching and learning experts, and encouraged by our gung-ho administrators, to learn, all over again, what it is that we already know – now neatly packaged into a model that can be easily sold across disciplines and around the world.

Or, put another way:

Arts and humanities instructors have had our teaching mansplained to us by the neoliberal university.

Let me be clear: I’m not saying flipped classrooms are bad things. They have many, many virtues – though they also have some significant blind spots, like assuming that the internet is a panacea as opposed to a massive time suck, that all lecturing is bad and uninteresting, and that all students learn better within “activity” frameworks. (All of these things are, um, not true.)

I’m also not suggesting that T&L centres and senior administrators are wrong to support active learning (not at all!), nor that I resent the discovery of active learning’s value in the sciences (holy mary jane, of course not!).

I’m also not trying to imply that teachers like me have been awesome at gathering data on our own classrooms and shouting about the success of our models. We do this, sure, but probably not enough; it’s obvious we need to do more of it, and perhaps do it better. Some of this problem is on us, and we need to get busy.

What really bothers me, and many teachers like me, though, is that our own universities rarely bother to notice the entire faculty (faculties, in my case) of “flipping” experts on their doorsteps. They don’t visit our classes, I doubt they read our teaching publications (check out the top theatre pedagogy journal in North America here), and all too often they don’t think to invite us to present on panels related to active learning models.

(Last autumn I was asked – thanks to my forward-thinking colleagues Aisha Haque and Nanda Dmitrov – to host a session on community engaged theatre and its classroom applications at Western’s big fall teaching conference. This was the first time such a session had been offered; a number of key people, very skeptical when the session was first floated, were surprised at how well it was attended and received. Again, I say: duh!)

Nope, we don’t routinely get asked or read or invited. Instead, we are routinely told:

• that studying the arts can’t get students jobs;
• that our research lacks “impact”;
• that we work on obscure topics without enough practical merit to encourage students and their parents to invest time and money in our classes.

So here’s my provocation. Could it be that, in the arts and humanities, our “impact”, our “value”, and our “interest” to students in search of both learning and jobs (yup, both of them, folks) might lie in the exceptional classroom experiences we can offer, as well as the remarkable pedagogical models we have pioneered and are eager to share with students and peers alike?

Could it be that as teachers we might inspire, change lives, redirect interests, and model excellent pedagogy – and not just for future teachers, but for current teachers across the disciplines as well?

If this is a “creative” economy, after all, our active(ist) arts classrooms are where creativity comes to life.

And yes: if you ask us, we’ll very happily talk about our awesome, crowd-shared, long-tested models with you. We’ll even make you get up on your feet! Just ask.

Please.

Kim

On flipping the theatre studies classroom… back again (part 1)

A few weeks back I was in Calgary for the annual conference of my professional association, CATR (the Canadian Association for Theatre Research). I was one of the organisers, so sadly missed a good deal of the stimulating research presentations on offer across our four days together. I did, however, manage to make time to support my colleagues Natalie Alvarez and Jenn Stephenson in a workshop we put together on “flipped classroom” practice for theatre history teachers.

We had a terrific crop of graduate instructors, early, mid-career, and senior teachers in the large and diverse cohort of participants, and initially I imagined I’d do a blog post reporting our findings; what happened during the session, though, really got me thinking about the ways in which “flipped classroom” practice has been sold to instructors across disciplines in North America, and how our particular labour as humanities teachers – and specifically theatre and performance teachers – has been co-opted (and even elided) in that process. So, today’s post will include reportage from the workshop and some of the discoveries we made as we talked; then, tomorrow, I’ll paint the second half of the picture, which will include some provocations for those who curate our campus centres for teaching and learning. (Listen up, gang!)

***

Our workshop began with a brief discussion about the perceived neutrality of the classroom lecture model (the workshop was originally prompted by Natalie’s reading of this New York Times article on that very issue). According to information included in the NYT piece, normative in-class content delivery models (i.e., come to the lecture, take notes, revise before the essay or exam) tend to privilege expert learners – those who’ve gone to “good” schools, had “good” teachers, and enjoyed plenty of support from parents and siblings at home as they figure out how to take in and process lecture material efficiently. In short: this claim argues that lecturing can often been heavily classed and culturally biased, especially against some new immigrants and the children of the working poor.

Natalie asked us if we bought this argument: is lecturing indeed a privileged form of learning? When, and for whom? This question hovered over the entire workshop, and in our second half it became a spur for vigorous discussion about how the “flipped classroom” model is also not value-neutral. Certainly, the current critical mass of literature indicates that flipped classrooms get better results for more students than lecturing tends to do, but what about its impact on instructors? Who is being encouraged to “flip”, and who is posing as the flipping expert? What resources are being offered (or not!) to those from whom flipping is expected, and what kinds of academic practices are being exploited, or indeed undervalued, along the way? (More on this tomorrow!)

After Natalie’s introduction, individual participants reported on a wide range of flipped-classroom resources that we (actually, Jenn and Nat) had curated in advance. (You can see the list of readings, complete with links, on our workshop blog here.) Quickly it became apparent that a lot of this stuff says a lot of the same things:

• flipping involves getting students to watch online materials in advance, do some advance reading (often also online), possibly complete some exercises or do some writing in relation to the viewing/reading, and then come to class prepared for a series of exploratory and problem-solving exercises based on that work. (This is often described as “pre-class”, “in-class”, and “post-class” labour);
• flipping is broadly beneficial for most students and data suggests that grades improve overall under flipped models;
• there are, within the pre-, in-, and post-class rubric, about a million ways actually to “flip” your classroom. (Indeed, you may already have flipped, and just don’t know it.)

Three compelling lines of inquiry emerged from our summaries:

1. it was rapidly obvious to the majority of us that “flipping” the classroom is really just a particularly rigorous, thoroughly integrated version of old-fashioned active learning. The shiny new label makes this practice seem super innovative, of course – a bandwagon needing jumping-onto by all and sundry, rather than simply sound classroom practice – and encourages, for better but also for worse, senior university administrators to get very excited (and demanding).
2. we talked about how heavily weighted toward the maths and sciences the literature on flipping tends to be. It’s often written by science-oriented teaching and learning scholars for (apparently often reluctant) maths and science teachers who (it is assumed) need schooling in the benefits of active learning. Everyone nodded at this trend: it’s one many of us have long perceived in our centres of teaching and learning on our various campuses. When was the last time you attended a teaching and learning event, one NOT organised by your faculty, that was delivered by an Arts instructor?
3. we talked about student perceptions of the flipped classroom. Some of us reported a predictable, neoliberal response: “why should I pay the university so I can teach myself?” Many others, however, reported both improved student outcomes and genuine student enthusiasm for what we might call thoroughgoing flipping: active learning labour curated carefully across an entire term, with clear links to work backwards and forwards in the semester, clear goals and outcomes, and very clear assignment rubrics.

The take-away from this last point was, for me, a truly useful one: many of us already teach using active learning models (small group discussions, in-class debates, video assignments, etc), but there’s a step beyond that worth taking: linking active learning tasks week-to-week, and developing a series of activity models that can become predictable for students, even as they are varied and fun. Participant and Queen’s University instructor Grahame Renyk talked about the challenges for both students and teachers of increased “cognitive load”: flipped learning is based on smaller, more numerous tasks for students rather than the “one big essay at term’s end”; that can often mean lowering the stakes for students assignment-to-assignment, which is a great thing, but it also risks overwhelming students as they find themselves unable to time-manage many smaller tasks. (And, of course, those can be more onerous to mark as well.) Predictability in this case is really important for students, as it crystal clarity on the course outline about what students should expect from class time; for teachers, consistency across the term’s labour can make prep and marking more streamline-able as well.

In other words: “flipping” your classroom, vs engaging in what we might call normative active learning, is mostly about effective pre-planning for both you and your students, alongside managing student expectations of how active learning works and what they can get from it. That means it’s also dependent on a few other, entirely practical things that teachers need to be thinking about, and that universities need to provide proper support for. 

For example:

SPACE MATTERS. Grahame and Jenn (who are colleagues and often team-teach at Queen’s) shared information about how classroom spaces impact their flipped-classroom work. Grahame has moved all uni-directional content delivery online in order to free up in-class space for other work, but still struggles with the proscenium arch-style classroom he is given for his large course (and which is not conducive to group work, to say the least). Jenn, meanwhile, has benefited from a pod-based classroom that is ideal for group work, but that doesn’t facilitate lecturing as there is no “front” (and thus some students need to strain physically to see her when she speaks to the whole class).

All of us had similar space stories to share. Increasingly universities are doing a better job of planning active learning classroom spaces as new buildings are built and others renovated, but what’s often lost in this process is the recognition that flipped classroom-style active learning embeds numerous teaching practices within a single course, and each of those practices will have different physical needs. For such teaching to work well, classroom spaces need to be flexible above all.

COMMUNITY MATTERS. Flipping the theatre studies classroom has long been, for me, about carefully curating student groups and giving students the opportunity to stay with the same peer group all year. Several of our participants reported using the same strategy. Students sometimes complain about this (BORING!!), but consistent groups not only help with cognitive load; they also mean students get to know one another as a team, learn about one another’s strengths and weaknesses, and form community bonds as they strategize around problems that emerge from clashing work styles. Lots of flipped classroom work happens in teams; getting the team right, and then letting its ethos evolve longer-term, is key.

ONLINE: ESSENTIAL OR NOT? In the second half of our discussion we talked a lot about the growing expectation that the flipped classroom also be “blended”: delivered at least in part online. We developed a healthy skepticism by workshop’s end about the perceived requirement for online components. Lots of students work from mobile; are our university’s virtual learning environments mobile-friendly (if they are even any good to start!)? The consensus in our room: rarely. Lots of students are similarly not that media-savvy; the digital-native generation knows how to check Instagram and torrent TV shows, but not necessarily how to post to a course blog without making all kinds of time-consuming errors that instructors or TAs must then tidy up. And then there’s the biggest question of them all: is more online labour really more efficient and effective, or is it just another make-work component of neoliberal university labour, in which administration is downloaded onto both instructors and students even as the university’s admin cohort bloats with overpaid VPs and deputy Provosts?

More on that, and much more on the politics of flipping the classroom, tomorrow.

Kim

Give me an effing break already!

A couple of weeks ago, as finals wound down and the interminable meetings that litter the exam period came to an end, I ran into my chair, Bryce, in our department’s main office. We exchanged some chat about bikes (our mutual passion) and Theatre Studies (our mutual project); I talked about my latest workplace trauma (of course). Then he said:

‘I really hope you’re planning to take a break this summer.’

People, more needed words were never spoken. And yet my gut reaction?

When? How?! AAGGGHHH!!!!!

I told him I’d scheduled a break for the week previous, and had ended up doing book revisions instead. Then I’d moved the scheduled break to the week in which we were chatting; obviously, that one had also gone sideways. I was looking into the end of May by that point, and colliding with a conference I’d been co-organizing, plus more book revisions, a paper for a conference I was attending in June, more work-related travel commitments…

I thought maybe I could do the break in July.

All this might well read to you as lame. ‘Good grief, woman!’ you might be thinking. You’re a tenured prof at a good school; take a freaking holiday already! And yet it’s actually hard, from the inside, to make that holiday time; thanks to email (aka 24/7 comms, aka My Modern Albatross), my tendency to say yes way too much (more on that in the coming weeks; see below), and my anxious reaction to Stuff That Piles Up On My Desk, I am far, far better at deferring the ‘scheduled’ holiday than taking it.

(My last holiday was a year ago, at the Sivananda ashram in southern Kerala, and a damn fine break it was. Although I did – in true academic fashion – check my email once a day just in case, and triage a page proof trauma one afternoon from the one spot in the joint that had reliable wifi. Do not judge me.)

Here, it doesn’t help either that I don’t have kids, or currently a partner, whose holiday needs might enforce my own; it also doesn’t help that I spend so much money on research travel (my own and my university’s, but – make no mistake – plenty of my own) that it’s hard to justify further outlays of cash on frivolities like, oh, I don’t know… my sanity.

Sometimes, though, the heavens grant you a gift, and this past weekend I got one. My dear friends Steven and Peter were moving out to their cottage, on the gorgeous South Shore of Nova Scotia, for the summer; they were bringing the family cats and needed a third to carry Baz, the sweet (and heavy!) old one, on the plane. They enlisted me, which got me a free round-trip ticket to Halifax, accom in a fantastic woodland hideaway, plus day tripping to the beach and evenings in the hot tub.

So I took a freaking break, already.

Make no mistake: this long weekend in the woods is NOT my summer holiday. If anything, it’s reminded me how much I need more down time this summer. So I’ve resolved that the week I return from my insane June research and conference travel will be a week off; I’m taking a virtual (email) holiday as well as a ‘real’ one. (You can hold me to it, and I’ll report on how it goes.)

Then, upon returning to work (slowly!), I am making it a proper task to figure out better work-life balance for the 2016-17 school year. Because I cannot live through another year like this past one, which was sheer hell and included a couple of serious close calls for me, personally. And because I have no intention of committing holiday time to thinking about my job in any way – even about how to balance my job and my life more effectively.

Academics may live our labour, but our labour does not need to live us.

***

As I travel in the coming weeks, I’ll be doing some teaching about teaching at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, England; I’ll also be reflecting on some of the stuff I learned about new (and old) advances in pedagogy in recent weeks from colleagues here in Canada, as well as thinking critically about the year of teaching just behind me.

Look forward to the following posts:

Next up: ‘Flipping’ the Theatre Studies Classroom… Back Again.

After that: The Year That Was, 2016: What Happened When the Students Created the Supplementary Course Reader and Set Their Own Deadlines…

And then: Learning to SAY NO. (Especially for my female friends, colleagues, and readers. Just. Say. No.)

Meanwhile: some holiday snaps for your enjoyment. Because: Nova Scotia is so beautiful that everyone should see it!

Warmly,

Kim