Performing Pedagogy: Creative Engagement and Collaborative Learning in a course on Brazil
Designing a new course is always exciting and energizing. And it is also labor-intensive and anxiety producing. Being part of the Bacca Fellowship and having the other fellows “in my corner” as I went into teaching Performing Brazil for the first time this fall made all the difference.
Designing a new course is always exciting and energizing. And it is also labor-intensive and anxiety producing. No matter how hard you try to have everything worked out and ready to go by the start of the semester, there are always gaps, unknowns and doubts. Being part of the Bacca Fellowship and having the other fellows “in my corner” as I went into teaching Performing Brazil for the first time this fall made all the difference.
My goal was to enhance this dynamic course – which combines seminar and studio classes to explore expressive culture and the politics of representation in Brazil - with creative and collaborative assessment projects. In one of our first meetings another fellow introduced us to the way she uses art materials to encourage students to experience the creative process “as a mode of thinking rather than production” (see Rhiannon Scharnhorst’s blog post below). I knew immediately I wanted to incorporate this idea into my unit on Brazilian carnival. I redesigned the assessment for that unit into a project in which in teams of three students created a Rio de Janeiro style carnival parade: they came up with a theme related to course topics, wrote samba song lyrics, designed costumes and built 3-D model floats. Many students commented on course evaluations that the carnival parade was their favorite assignment; and the top of my office bookshelf is now lined with miniature floats!
During a monthly Bacca meeting dedicated to working through the project for my final unit on Brazilian activist and theatre practitioner Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, my colleagues challenged me to think carefully about how much I wanted to ask students to draw from their own experiences of social injustice at Duke to develop Boal’s famous Forum and Street theatre interventions. After some hard thinking, I decided, at least for this first experiment and with the limited time I had, I would design a fun, low-stakes intervention myself. The students were excited by my idea: to disrupt commuter etiquette by turning the C1 Bus into a dance party on its trip from West to East Campus. In the end the project didn’t pan out as I couldn’t nail down the exact days and times that the C1 bus driver famous for playing full volume merengue and salsa music (while riders stay seated looking at their phones) drove the bus. So, we experimented with student-led Boalian theatre games in the classroom instead. It was thanks to the Bacca Fellowship community of practice that I was able to pivot - and pivot again - on this pedagogical journey.
Inspiration and support didn’t stop after our regular meetings ended! Towards the end of teaching my Anthropology of Childhood course this spring, I decided I wanted to do something different for the final presentations of student projects. I remembered two of the fellows talking about a “museum exhibit” model. I jumped on email and asked them if they had any guidelines to share with me. One immediately sent me the prompt she had previously used and the other told me she was trying out the model for the first time that week and would send me her feedback afterwards. On the last day of class this spring I will be turning my classroom into my own version of a museum gallery thanks to the support and tips from my Bacca fellow-friends.
IMAGE CREDIT: Katya Wesolowski
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Katya Wesolowski
