Teaching Writing Across Theatre and Performance Studies
Description
From traditional play analysis and theatre history courses to creative writing courses like playwriting, writing is everywhere in theatre and performance studies. Yet, many of these classes fail to emphasize the tools common to rhetoric and composition classes and writing studies programs that help students generate and refine new work. Harnessing cross-field "writing in the disciplines" and critical university studies approaches, this collection of practical instructor-oriented resources from scholars teaching at a range of institutional types surveys both undergraduate and graduate theatre and performance studies classrooms to identify best practices and common pitfalls in writing instruction. Teaching Across Theatre and Performance Studies: A Resource Guide provides detailed lesson plans for teaching students the mechanics of research methods, editing, and revision, while offering course assignments to support instructors seeking to enhance student writing. Whether you teach playwriting, dramaturgy, theatre history, dance, design, or performance criticism, this guide offers adaptable strategies for making writing central to the work of theatre and performance studies.
More details
Persons
Samuel Yates is Assistant Professor of Theatre at The Pennsylvania State University (USA). Their interdisciplinary research focuses on disability, performance, accessibility, and pedagogy. Samuel's forthcoming book, Cripping Broadway: Producing Disability in Musical Theatre , earned the 2025 Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities. You can follow their work online at samuelryates.com.
Jeanmarie Higgins is the editor of Teaching Critical Performance Theory in Today's Theatre Classroom, Studio, and Communities (2020), and co-editor of Teaching Performance Practices in Remote and Hybrid Spaces (2022) with dance and somatics practitioner Elisha Clark Halpin. Professor and Chair of Theatre Arts and Dance at the University of Texas at Arlington (USA), Jeanmarie is the 2021 recipient of the Oscar Brockett Award in Teaching from the Association of Theatre in Higher Education.
Content
Chapter 1: Navigating Research-Practice Divisions in the Field: New Directions for Writ-ing in Theatre and Performance Studies.- Part I: Research Writing Pedagogies.- Chapter 2: It's All Composition: Undermining Theory/Practice Divides in Writing Instruction.- Chapter 3: Teaching Writing with AI: An Artificial Tool to Get Real Results.- Chapter 4: Reading to Write: Cultivating "Slow" Surface Readings as Accessible Theatre Pedagogy.- Chapter 5: Situationships and Relationships with Words: Invitations Toward a Care-filled Pedagogy of Writing for Theatre.- Chapter 6: Mixed Writing and Research for Theatre/Performance Designers and Others.- Chapter 7: Writing in Many Forms: The UnEssay as Means of Accessibility and Creativity.- Chapter 8: The Article Analysis: Building Writing Skills in the Theatre History Classroom.- Chapter 9: Teaching Artist-Centered Library Orientations.- Part II: Dramaturgies and Criticism.- Chapter 10: The Curious Critic: Threshold Concepts for Writing Non-Expert Performance Reviews.- Chapter 11: Digital Narratives: Exploring Digital Dramaturgy in Undergraduate Theatre and Performance Courses.- Chapter 12: Writing Dance Critique: Leading Questions of Analysis for Musical Theatre Dance.- Chapter 13: A Pedagogy of Alterity: Playwriting with Indian Popular Culture.- Chapter 14: Writing to Destroy: Writing a Joker Play and Breaking All the Rules.- Chapter 15: Collaborative Playwriting in the Borderlands.- Part III: Applied Arts Writing.- Chapter 16: Making It Worth It: Flipping and Reversing the University Theatre Season Through Letters to the Artistic Director.- Chapter 17: Multimodal Writing in the Introductory Theatrical Design Course: Developing Literacies for the Twenty-First Century.- Chapter 18: Write What You Know: Designing from Your Personal Library.- Chapter 19: All Our World Onstage: Developing Literacies for Asynchronous or Hybrid Learning Environments.- Chapter 20: "Show Your Work": Fostering Self-Awareness through Performance-Based Assessments of a Program Note.- Chapter 21: So Much Like Life: Performative Writing as Adaptive Response to Sociopolitical Issues.- Chapter 22: Nurturing Interiority to Create Point of View: A Scaffolded Approach to Teaching Autoethnographic Writing to Undergraduate Theatre Students.- Chapter 23: Writing In and For Dance: Pedagogies of Practice for Dance Educators.- Chapter 24: Resource Appendix.