Exploring Religious Tolerance through Community-Based Theater

Integrating the Ideas and Practice of Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal into the Undergraduate Classroom

In spring 2003 I taught a course at Davidson College entitled Community-based Theatre for Social Change. In this course, I wanted to experiment with two mutually engaging methods of learning. First, the creation of a community-based performance on the topic of faith and religious tolerance would be an integral component of this course. Second, I wanted to infuse my classroom with the Freirian pedagogical principles that are foundational to the goals of community-based theater (CBT). What would happen if, while teaching a course on community-based theater, I attempted to teach the students both through the course’s content and form? Could I simultaneously – and successfully – share with students my historical, theoretical and practical knowledge about CBT, while also relinquishing the authority that a professor at an institution like Davidson traditionally possesses? Could I persuade them to take greater responsibility for their own learning and convince them that I was seriously ceding to them the power to determine grades? Would students embrace such a learning opportunity? Lastly, would students be able to overcome the “culture of politeness” that permeates the campus in order to create a meaningful dialogue for the Davidson College community on the issue of religious tolerance and discrimination? I want to share some of the pedagogical strategies I deployed within the course, as well as the process we used to create our performance and the relative success and shortfalls of each.

The Community

The particular example I discuss involves teaching an upper-lever seminar class at Davidson College. Davidson College is a small, liberal-arts college affiliated with the Presbyterian Church, located in North Carolina. It is also a college that has, in recent years, revisited the nature of its relationship with the Church and made various changes to that relationship.[1] Davidson is consistently ranked in the top tier of liberal-arts schools in the country, a fact that is the source of great pride. A short drive from a major city, it is located in a small town that has made great effort to resist the encroachment of urban sprawl and retain its small-town identity. Community service is an integral part of college life for the majority of students and for the institution, reflecting its Presbyterian heritage. The class I was teaching inherently shared many of the college’s foundational philosophies, yet the Freirian model I hoped to emulate was likely unfamiliar to students.

Religious organizations and exploration of faith are woven into the fabric of the institution and student life. The chaplain describes the institution as one that “values the life of the spirit and fosters openness to and respect for the world's various faith traditions. With many religious resources and organizations on campus, we seek to be a community where everyone may grow spiritually through worship, fellowship, service and study.”[2] While the vast majority of students identify as Christian, the college is committed to promoting tolerance for all faith practices, and a newly founded Jewish Students Union evidences growing diversity. Still, the college’s mission remains rooted in Christian principles. In addition to the numerous religious organizations in which students can participate, and the various worship opportunities on campus and in town, the College also provides many opportunities for faith-based community service. And yet, Davidson students identified religious discrimination as a significant concern during a theater workshop the year prior to this course. The combination of these two – a community that highly values faith and religion, and yet in which some of its members had experienced some sort of discrimination – compelled my choice of religious tolerance as the issue we would spend the semester exploring.

Course Goals and Strategies

The goals for the course, as described on the syllabus were as follows:

This course investigates the potential for theater and performance to be catalysts for social change. We will explore the ways in which theater has been an efficacious site for cultural and political interventions that disrupt dominant and oppressive power structures. The course will also look at the way in which particular performance techniques have been practiced in very different contexts and explore the potential for a radical theatrical practice in our own communities. Focusing specifically on community-based theater, we will explore the ways in which performance has participated in struggles against oppression of various kinds, and has been integral to community building. How have performance and theater been utilized as radical forms of cultural and political intervention? How can theater be used to articulate community conflict and facilitate dialogue? What are the practical and ethical issues confronted by those who do this sort of work? To address these questions we will consider case studies from various historical and geographical contexts and learn various practical activities used by community-based theater practitioners. The course also features a weeklong residency with director and activist Michael Rohd who will assist us in creating our own performance.

Despite dissimilarities in form and method, many of the foundational ideas articulated by Paulo Freire in "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," unite the goals and orientation of much community-based theater work around the world. Because of this, my pedagogical goal for the course was to create a learning environment that incorporated these fundamental Freirian principles. My hope was, to the greatest extent possible, radically alter the power dynamics in my classroom (without simply announcing that I was doing so). I wanted students to experience the possibilities of a different learning environment, one in which they weren’t simply encouraged to be recipients of knowledge, but in which they were encouraged to develop critical skills that would allow them to read the world, not just the word (to poach from Freire) in way that would be applicable beyond my class. I wanted them to truly be in control of what and how they learned, and how their learning was assessed. Ultimately, I hoped that in addition to whatever they learned about CBT, they would also learn, in an experiential way, about empowerment and pedagogy. Some of the strategies I deployed to accomplish this goal include:

• Grades for assignments were decided upon mutually by the student and myself after discussion.
• The syllabus included a section entitled “proposed assignments.” I told students that what they did for the class was entirely up to them, but that the assignments must contribute in some way to their learning process. The assignments I listed were just suggestions and they were welcome to propose others. For example, on the original syllabus, I proposed that students complete a research paper due at the end of the term, but midway through the semester students proposed doing a project rather than a paper. In the end, 11 of the 13 students decided to participate in one of two group projects; each group conducted a workshop using various CBT techniques to explore a particular issue.
• Similarly, the syllabus contained a section titled, “proposed grading system.” I asked students to consider what I proposed, and suggest changes, or discuss concerns. We continued this discussion throughout the semester, making changes as we went along.
• Each student was asked to complete a final self-assessment due the last class session in which they were to assess their contribution to the intellectual community of the class and the extent to which they had met the “learning” goals of the course, and give themselves a grade. There was only one case in which I did not give the student the grade he or she proposed.
• Each class session was approached as a dialogue. For every session that we had assigned reading, discussion was facilitated by a group of two or three students who were to arrive with questions about the work to pose to the class for discussion.
• Each class session included a student presentation of a "case study." Students chose theater companies from a list I compiled and summarized for the class the company’s history, mission and methods. I told the students that I knew very little about many of these companies; their research would make them the class expert on the subject. Students also took turns facilitating warm-up exercises – which they researched and practiced before class – each session that we were engaged in practical exercises.
• The final piece of written work for the course was a community-based theater project proposal. In this proposal students needed to synthesize all of the issues dealt with in the course as they planned and justified their own CBT project.
• In preparation for the residency and the final performance, students were assigned to a "backstage crew." Each of those crews was responsible for some logistical aspect of the residency and performance. Each crew was given a budget and had complete authority over how money was spent. A group project leader was elected by her classmates and was responsible for checking in with each crew, determining their progress and their support needs. She was also responsible for making sure all crews created a schedule and stuck with it; any problems with any crews were to be reported to me.

While I was excited about the course design, the upcoming residency and the pedagogical challenge on which I was to embark, I was also aware that there were many issues I had yet to resolve. Some of the unanswered pedagogical questions and concerns I had:

• What about students who just don’t try at all? How would I deal with them?
• Would students really be willing to embrace a different learning environment, or is the "banking style of education’"so deeply engrained in their understanding of education that this experiment would seem too weird to them? Would my pedagogical strategies be enough to shift these deeply engrained expectations of a classroom and teacher?
• Would some think this was a "blow-off" class in which they could get an "easy A" because I was allowing them to decide their own grades?
• How would they behave toward one another? Would they do shoddy work on presentations for their classmates (a waste of time that I loathe)? Would I be able to motivate them to want to do excellent work?
• Would I be able to alter my own "performance" of professor enough to facilitate the changes I desired? Would I be comfortable enough relinquishing power to stick with it?

Another obstacle that concerned me — mostly for our efforts to create a performance about religious tolerance and discrimination, and about which students spoke during the semester — is the culture of politeness that permeates the campus. Several students cited this “veneer of pleasantness” as an obstacle to honest dialogue on campus about anything negative, such as prejudice; given the sensitive and deeply personal nature of the topic at hand, they were particularly concerned. Perhaps because the campus emphasizes the importance of tolerance of difference, many in the class felt intimidated at the prospect of creating a performance that might reveal that there was intolerance or prejudice in our midst. I too was concerned about our ability to get beyond superficialities in order to create a meaningful dialogue, rather than a “feel-good,” congratulatory performance. As I will discuss below, in the end this did prove to be the greatest challenge in catalyzing a discussion beyond our performance.

There are two other important factors to consider that I believe impacted the success of my pedagogical strategies. First, I already knew several of the students enrolled in the class. Some I knew because they had taken classes with me before, others I knew because they had worked on department productions. The intensity of the production process yields a particular kind of intimacy, both between student and professor, and amongst the students themselves. This intimacy inevitably impacted the dynamics in the classroom.

Second was the fact that I started the semester seven months pregnant. How would the "script" of my changed and changing body contribute to my performance of authority? As I look back on that semester, I do think that the very real fact that I would be absent for some period during the semester (a period during which they were slated to be doing their fieldwork) enhanced the students’ sense of ownership and responsibility. Their necessary involvement in and knowledge of my life beyond the classroom, evident each class session in my growing belly and diminishing physical ability during various exercises I was facilitating, enhanced my ability to relinquish authority in the classroom. My return, four weeks after my son was born, four weeks after the students surprised me with an in-class baby shower, and the day before Michael Rohd’s residency was slated to begin, did not yield my resumption of that authority. On the contrary, the intensity of the residency meant that my newborn son spent a great deal of time in the rehearsal room with us; it meant my students became even more aware of my life beyond the classroom and my postpartum frailties.

The Class

We did two things simultaneously throughout the semester. First we read about, discussed and experienced various different community-based theater methodologies. For example, while one class session was a three-hour workshop introducing the techniques of Augusto Boal’s Image Theatre, another was focused on discussion of the ways in which various practitioners have used oral histories to create CBT. I tried to combine history, theory and practice on a daily basis in the classroom.

Second, we prepared for the course’s culminating performance that would explore the topic of faith and religious tolerance on the Davidson campus. The performance would be created collaboratively under the guidance of director and community-based theater artist Michael Rohd during a nine-day residency during the last month of the semester. In order to organize the residency and the course, I had to select a topic for our performance well in advance of the class’ first meeting. I chose faith and religious tolerance for several reasons, including the fact that in 2003, we were preparing to go to war with a Muslim nation and all sorts of religious prejudices permeated the daily life of our nation and many of its citizens. My primary reason for selecting this topic, however, is that the students themselves really chose it: The year prior, during a workshop with a visiting artist, the majority of students chose the topic “religious discrimination” from a long list of other discriminations to explore through the techniques of CBT. My choice to focus the course on the same topic was a follow-up, I thought, to an already articulated student concern. In retrospect, the fact that I chose the topic in advance may have yielded some of the bumps we encountered on our journey.

Research and Preparation for the Residency

Students undertook various research and writing assignments to prepare for Michael Rohd’s residency in late April. Under Michael’s leadership, we were to use the raw materials students gathered throughout the semester to create a performance whose goal was to generate dialogue about experiences of discrimination related to faith and religious practice. Prior to the beginning of the semester, I had met with several individuals involved in religious life on campus who agreed to be “resource persons” for our project. Because I was not very familiar with the various religious organizations and the issues related to faith that existed on our campus, I tried to familiarize myself with these before the semester began. The class began its research the second week of the semester by brainstorming questions we might want to pose to the community on the our topic. We originally hoped to narrow these down to 2 or 3 overarching questions that would give shape and direction to our research; in the end we did not do so. Some of the questions students asked included:

• What role does family play in your religious life?
• What are the most important values of your religion?
• What role should religion play in college policy?
• Is there a difference between religiousness and spirituality?
• Is there any real religious discrimination at Davidson?
• Have you experienced any pressure at college to adapt your religious beliefs?
• How do you define discrimination?
• How available are places of worship for minority communities?
• How involved are you in religious life on campus?
• How have your religious beliefs and/or practices changed since you came to Davidson?
• Is "tolerance" of difference enough?

After this brainstorming session we decided to compile a list of key religious organizations on campus. The hope was to approach answers to some of the questions we generated by getting to know these organizations and their members. As we did this, several students expressed a concern that if we only spoke with students who were members of a religious organization, we might not get an accurate picture of our community’s feelings on this issue. This is especially true, as one student noted, because those that might feel some level of alienation from organized religion, or discrimination, are less likely to be members of an organization. We brainstormed ways to reach a broader cross-section of our community. It was decided that we would include key religious organizations (i.e. , those with the largest constituencies, those that yielded the greatest influence on campus, those that represented minority communities on campus, and/or those with which people in the class had experiences of discrimination). We also included non-religious organizations, such as an athletic team, the International Students’ Association and members of the faculty (primarily in the Religion Department).

How might we begin to get a sense of the range of answers to these questions that exist within our community? Garth Green – my husband and a cultural anthropologist – agreed to participate in a two-part workshop with students to introduce them to fieldwork methods and ethics, and assist them in constructing their own research plans. The class was divided into 4 research teams. Each team selected two to three organizations and/or groups of people on campus to be the subjects of their research. Students drafted research plans for each organization with which they planned to do research, and Garth returned to class a few weeks later to provide feedback on these plans. The research included, but was not limited to: formal and informal interviews with members (past and present) and leaders; attendance at various sponsored events; surveys distributed to members of group; research on history of organization. Ultimately we were trying to gather as much information as possible to be able to express in our performance the wide range of experiences felt within the Davidson community around the issue of faith and religious tolerance.

The Residency

Michael arrived in Davidson at the end of April, and spent nine days working with the 13 students in my class. The students were scheduled to spend approximately 30 hours working with Michael in preparation for a workshop-style performance, the goal of which was to catalyze a dialogue on the various issues and experiences it presented. In the end, students worked more hours than this, as many of them met with Michael outside of rehearsal to work on particular sections of the performance, and others met with each other to rehearse particular scenes.

In preparation for the residency, Michael and I began a dialogue in the fall to work out practical and artistic issues. While he would join students for a brief time, we wanted the residency to be a continuation of a longer project on the theme of religious tolerance that students would pursue throughout the semester. We agreed on several assignments that would lay the groundwork for the theatrical exploration he would facilitate, and which students would complete prior to his arrival. In addition to our fieldwork, these included collecting articles from local and national newspapers that related to our topic in some way. Students were asked to keep journals that included their own reactions to these articles. He also asked them to prepare “who am I” statements so that he could better acquaint himself with the students and their experiences related to the issue we were exploring.

In order for our performance to reflect diverse voices and perspectives and generate a meaningful dialogue, I felt we needed to involve as many members of our community in the creative process as possible. We decided to hold two two-hour workshops during the residency that would be open to the entire college community. The students in my class chose the topics for those workshops, in part based on the issues that emerged during their research. We hoped these topics would appeal to various members of the community (students, faculty, staff) and indeed those attending represented all three of these groups. The two themes we chose were:

• “You go to a Presbyterian College. How do you feel about that?”
• “Faith, Priorities and College Life: How is your faith perspective a part of your college life?”

It was disappointing to me that these workshops were poorly attended (four to six people for each). Despite the poor attendance, Michael continued with the planned agenda, and virtually everyone who attended one of those workshops was represented, verbatim, in the final performance.

During the residency, students were introduced to Michael’s style of gestural theater and used this as the basic "language" with which they created their final performance. Michael introduced students to the ways in which this nonrealistic gestural language could be used to create a physical "score" that was inspired by the text while never a realistic illustration of it. For example, early in the residency, students paired up and listened to their partner’s reaction to the question: What would it be like if everything your faith taught you was true, turned out to actually be false? Each person in the pair took a turn as the speaker and the listener. The listener took two to three verbatim sentences from her partner’s response and created a physical "score" that she performed as she spoke this "real text" monologue gleaned from her partner. These 13 performance pieces revealed a wide range of reactions to the issue we were exploring. This same research and performance strategy was used in each of the two workshops that were open to the entire community. The gestural language Michael taught students was not realistic; rather, at times it seemed to suggest the subtext of the words spoken, but other times had a less clear relationship with the spoken text. Students explored this synthesis of real text – taken from their fieldwork, newspaper articles or one another's words – and nonrealistic gesture throughout the residency creating numerous mini-performance pieces. It was only in the last few days of the residency that we selected the scenes that would be included in our final performance and then began to focus more earnestly on rehearsals, rather than on the generation of performance material. We, of course, continued making changes to our performance up until the very last minute.

The Performance

"The Faith Project: A Documentary," was performed in the Student Union on a Friday afternoon and was attended by approximately 100 people, including students, staff and faculty. The performance consisted of several scenes that were connected through theme only, not narrative. Most of them featured Michael’s style of nonrealistic, gestural theater that gave the performance its unifying aesthetic structure. Each performance piece used verbatim text that was generated at some point during students’ research, the residency or one of the two communitywide workshops.Before including the words of any individual in the performance, individuals were contacted and asked for permission; no words were used without the speaker’s permission. The words that echoed in the performance venue were from a wide range of sources: students, faulty, staff, members of various religious groups on campus, students in my class and attendees at workshops. The performance dealt with a wide range of experiences related to faith, not all explicitly about discrimination, although in dealing with different perspectives on faith and religious belief, it did attempt to understand the roots of conflicts that members of our community had experienced. Words were never explicitly attributed to a particular speaker; although in such a small community there were at least two instances in which recognition was likely.

The performance was followed by a discussion session during which time audience members were encouraged to react to what they saw, or ask questions. Much of the discussion focused on process; audience members were curious about where the text came from, the performative style, and how the gestures were created. Immediately following the performance, it was clear to me that several staff members were visibly upset by the performance. A few spoke during the discussion session to articulate the fact that they did not feel that the performance reflected their own experience of faith at Davidson; apparently our performance represented a greater amount of disagreement, intolerance and skepticism than they felt existed within the community.

I learned later, in discussion with these colleagues, that the performance piece that primarily caused their negative reactions was one that dealt with the issue of proselytizing. This scene was intended to explore the tension that our research uncovered exists between those whose faith prescribes some sort of proselytizing and others on campus who were uncomfortable by their peers’ attempts to change their faith perspective. In this performance, four actors stood on a balcony above the stage and the audience area — two stood stage right, and two stage left — and spoke their lines into microphones set on opposite sides of the stage. On one side were two actors whose words explored the importance of proselytizing, on the other were the voices of those who found such activities upsetting, or offensive. While their words filled the performance space, the other ten actors onstage below them danced a very graceful waltz to discordant music. The contrast between the spoken text and the visual text exemplifies the rest of the performance as well. An excerpt from this performance piece:

"It’s difficult for me not to take something personally when a friend tells me he or she thinks my soul is going to hell." —from the performance, "The Faith Project: A Documentary"

"A friend originally brought me along and showed me the power of scripture. I developed a personal relationship with God, and my faith. Now with my entire heart and soul I view it as my responsibility to bring that faith and that power to the people I most care about."

"It’s difficult for me not to take something personally when a friend tells me he or she thinks my soul is going to hell. If I live by the same morals that his or her religion upholds it bothers me that he or she thinks that I’m going to hell – that’s not a friend."

"What you have to understand is that I care about what happens to you. This isn’t random, this isn’t arbitrary. I believe that if you don’t take on my faith, if you don’t see the world and God the way that I do, you have an awful fate awaiting you. I care too much about you to let that happen, I would risk my life for you on this earth, so I would certainly risk your irritation to save what is more important than your life, your soul."

"I know that you want me to go to church with you, but that’s not something that I am ready to do. For you to say that God is only in church offends me because I believe that God is everywhere, I have my own special relationship with God without needing to read the bible or go to church. I’m ok on my own."

This scene clearly suggested that there was some conflict in our community. Our hope was to accurately portray each perspective in an effort to see where they misunderstood one another, and to catalyze a dialogue about their conflicts. In the immediate and long-term aftermath of the performance one fact of this performance piece haunted me: It wasn’t truly based on "real-text."

The Performance Aftermath

Our last class session of the semester was devoted to a discussion of the performance and the residency. Several students brought up the fact that they were uncomfortable having labeled our performance a documentary, especially because the scene that seemed to most upset audiences members was one based on improvisation. The fact that our performance was titled, "The Faith Project: A Documentary," students thought, constituted misrepresentation.

The scene excerpted above that dealt with the issue of proselytizing was based on an improvisation done during the residency. Students in class cited the attempts of their peers to convert them to a particular faith perspective as an example of discrimination they felt on campus. We began to explore strategies to negotiate this discrimination through the use of Augusto Boal’s forum theater. We created an activating scene featuring a student who constantly tried to convince his hallmates to come to church with him, and convert them to his way of thinking. Other students, playing the role of various hallmates, rehearsed strategies to convince him to curtail his proselytizing activities. Immediately after this, Michael facilitated an improvisation that featured each student taking on the persona/character of someone with one of these two perspectives — the main character’s or those that felt oppressed by his actions — and speaking a brief monologue to someone of the opposing perspective. We videotaped this improvisation and then transcribed the text. The words we spoke during this improvisation then became the text for the proselytizing scene in our final performance. In point of fact, all of the words were indeed ones that had been spoken during the workshop, but students were speaking “in character.” Most of the students agreed that while they may have been playing a character, the idea they articulated as that character was either their own, or one they heard expressed at some point during their research by a fellow student. The audience of course did not know this. They knew only that the performance billed itself as a documentary and some of them felt that that particular episode inaccurately portrayed the campus community.

The fact that students were uncomfortable labeling the performance a documentary only came up after the performance. Why didn’t you do or say anything before the performance, I asked them? Should I, as the instructor, have intervened? I was not just asking these questions in terms of logistics, but was also asking students to consider these questions within the context of the ethical dilemmas CBT artists face that we discussed all semester, and also within the context of the Freirian goals of the class. If they were indeed responsible for the performance, and had been given the power, right and authority to question things, why hadn’t they questioned this? Many of them, in response to this last question, answered that they were so engrossed in the residency itself, and trusted in Michael, that they did not want to question anything. Some said that they weren’t quite sure how certain material they were generating during the residency would be used in performance and once they were they felt it was too late to say anything, as the date for the performance was quickly approaching. Several others however defended our right to call the performance a documentary. While the actual words spoken during the contested episode were generated during an improvisation, the ideas and sentiments on which the actors drew came from their research on campus. Each of the mini-monologues articulated a point of view that was held by a Davidson student, said the students in class, and this qualified their presentation in a performance called a documentary.

In the month following the performance I spoke with some other members of the campus community about their reactions to the performance. What some found upsetting was that this episode suggested that there still was much discord amongst Davidson community members around the issue of religion and tolerance. There are many within our community who have worked very hard to make Davidson a more tolerant place (which it has indeed become), and this performance, several felt, suggested that their work was not done. Students in my class also thought that we may have presented a skewed sense of things because the beliefs of the students in the class were not representative of the campus community at large (this is often the case in a theater class). Their own points of view, they argued, may have skewed how material was presented, creating an inaccurate portrayal of the community.

I had hoped, when I originally designed the residency, that including events open to the entire community would serve as a corrective to this skew and enhance the range of perspectives presented. Looking back on the project, I do not think I did enough to ensure that a wide enough range of voices reverberated in the performance. I could have worked harder to more deeply involve others in the residency, rather than relying on those that showed up to one of the two communitywide workshops. If I were to do this project again, I would instead partner with some campus organization (i.e., one of the organizations that was the subject of our research) for each of two such workshops.

In the end, while I thought our performance successfully overcame the culture of politeness that permeates the campus, and presented a range of perspectives on community member’s experiences with tolerance and discrimination, I do not think the performance was able to generate further dialogue on these issues. In large part this was due to two things: a lack of post-performance programming and the timing of our performance (the last week of classes). But I suspect that there are other reasons that our performance didn’t catalyze greater dialogue on the issues it presented. While the students in the class may have felt empowered, after a semester’s worth of work, to break with this culture of politeness, perhaps those in the audience were not. The desire to imagine ourselves a community that welcomes difference rather than just tolerates it, does not create an environment conducive to sustained dialogue about fundamental ideological differences. Such a dialogue requires dwelling on those differences in order to explore them.

I keep coming back to the conundrum of evangelism: if one is trying to promote tolerance and respect for difference, and if this community wants to be a place where acceptance of differences is paramount, what sort of attitude should one take towards proselytizing, an activity that is an inherent rejection of difference, yet simultaneously an activity vital to some community members’ practice of their faith? I don’t think it is coincidence, nor the possible misrepresentation as documentary, that yielded the reactions discussed above to the performance piece on proselytizing. The frankness with which the two sides of this debate were articulated in our performance, and the absence of a resolution, did not create a context in which members of our community felt comfortable expressing themselves and engaging in dialogue.

The fall semester after teaching this course, I asked all those students who were still in attendance at Davidson if they would like to collaborate with me on a presentation for the Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed (PTO) Conference. The presentation would be a critical analysis of the course and the residency. Where did we succeed, where did we fail and why? Three students agreed to participate in this project. Funding for students from my department and the Dean’s office made it possible for the four of us to attend the conference in Omaha in April 2004. My approach to our preparations for the conference paralleled that for the course; we were four collaborators with equal authority and responsibility for a successful presentation. We met weekly over a six-week period to create our presentation, during which time the students took responsibility for dividing up the work, keeping track of our ideas, writing an outline for the presentation, reviewing videotapes of parts of the performance and workshop and communicating ideas. One student took on the role of scribe: She took notes throughout our sessions and kept track of how we delegated tasks. The students were well prepared, thoughtful and organized and their presentation met with great success.

As we prepared for the PTO conference, almost a full year after the performance itself, I came back to the question of labeling our performance a documentary. Shouldn’t I, as the teacher and the “expert” in the room have caught the ethical problem of presenting our work as, in its entirety, a documentary? While I had indeed encouraged students to take responsibility for their work, I too as the one who had more experience with CBT had certain responsibilities. I wonder why this contradiction didn’t occur to me at the time as an ethical problem that needed to be addressed. I realize that much of the answer lies in my personal life. Michael’s residency began when my son was four weeks old and I was probably not as intellectually present as I would have liked to be. With a year of perspective, I realize this had an impact on the way with which this issue was dealt.

Student Self-assessments

For their final assignment, I asked students to assess their contribution to the intellectual community of the class and their own learning, and propose a final course grade for themselves. I was moved as I read students’ self-evaluations. It seemed that they really got it, really understood the importance of participating in their own learning process, of honing a critical reading of the world around them, and they gained a deep appreciation for the ways in which theater could participate in all of these things. I share below excerpts from some of those self-assessments:

• "What I’ve learned and what I will take away from this class really has no grade value and never could. I’ve learned so much about the material but also about myself and even what I want to do with my life.” –from a student self-evaluation

  “I am walking away from this class feeling great about the quality of my work and how much I got out that work … In an honest assessment of my own work I cannot hesitate to give myself an A or A- … I think the lowest grade I could possibly have earned is a B+ but until we leave this oppressive society and join Paulo Freire, I will leave the final decision of that up to you.”

• “This class has really gotten me to appreciate the Freirian notion of learning. I took a very active role in my learning process and was extremely committed to that . . . I have gotten so much from this class and so didn’t mind putting my all into the learning process.”

• “I feel that if our grades were to be based on our motivation, amount learned, love or inspiration factor in this class then I would most definitely deserve an A. However, I’m really fine with whatever grade you choose to give me. What I’ve learned and what I will take away from this class really has no grade value and never could. I’ve learned so much about the material but also about myself and even what I want to do with my life.”

Thoughts on My Own Learning

I couldn’t discuss the experience of teaching this class without also talking about the many things I learned along the way. Given my personal circumstance, many of the things I learned were quite personal. My students’ compassion astounded me. The need to take responsibility for their own learning brought out abilities in students with whom I had worked previously but had never noticed; I chided myself for underestimating them.

While I do not believe I was ever able to fully relinquish power and authority in the classroom — after all I was still the one who gave students grades, and grades are very important to most of the students at Davidson — I do believe I was successful in sharing both of these with students. I do think students felt more in control of what they learned and what grades they received than in any other course I have taught. I learned that creating an infrastructure that appears to give students control and power is not enough. The greatest potential for creating a radical shift in power occurred in small, particular moments; in the ways I participated in class discussions, in how I reacted to a student’s assessment of her oral presentation during our after-class meeting, in my reaction to student requests for various alterations to the class schedule, and in how I chose to deal with students who were clearly not making the same level effort as others.

I learned that sharing authority and power did not nullify my responsibilities to the students. I arrived in this class community with greater knowledge about the history of CBT, the issues concerning its practice, and experience working with its methods. This gave me the responsibility to guide students’ learning, to introduce them to key concepts, methods and practitioners. But, too, I arrived with my own opinions that would shape their experience of both the course’s content and the topic we explored for the residency. My belief that the field of community-based theater is worthy of intellectual rigor and that it can also teach students what it means to belong to a community in a profound way inevitably impacted what I chose to teach. In addition, students’ inevitable awareness of my politics and faith beliefs must have impacted what they chose to share from their research, and how experiences were presented in our performance.

Because we worked together throughout the semester on the topic of religious tolerance, and focused our inquiry on the college campus, I learned more than I can reiterate here about students’ beliefs, the conflicts that exist within various Christian faiths, and how students deal with the dissonance of having everything they thought they knew challenged. Although, I still have much to learn about engaging these differences in meaningful, productive dialogue. I think I have a much greater understanding of the community in which I work and live as a result, and have greater compassion for my students’ everyday experiences, and both of these facts have changed the kind of teacher I continue to try and become.

Sharon Green is an assistant professor in the Department of Theatre and Speech at Davidson College in North Carolina. Her work has been published in Theatre, Theatre Topics and Theatre Journal. She has participated, as an actor, director and facilitator, in numerous community-based and forum theater performances. She was also a founding member of the feminist theater collective Something Permanent, and is an active member of the Theatre and Social Change focus group within the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE).

NOTES

[1] For example, just a few weeks ago, it was approved that non-Christians could serve on the Davidson College Board of Trustees. This major policy shift led to the resignation of two members of the Board of Trustees, and a series of articles in the Charlotte Observer.

[2] College chaplain, Rob Spach, quoted on college website.

Original CAN/API publication: June 2005