Curriculum Design
Engaging Performance
Students in Engaging Performance participate in a capoeira workshop before attending a Brazilian dance performance.
From 2014-2019, I worked with faculty teams from U-M’s College of Literature, Science and the Arts (LSA) and its School of Music, Theatre & Dance to design “Engaging Performance,” a course introducing undergraduate students from all academic disciplines to the performing arts through the lens of the UMS season. Students meet with UMS visiting artists and guest experts, experiment with the art forms they will see on stage, and learn how to write and speak critically about performance.
Presenting with Course Development Grantee Adam Eickmeyer on his teaching project using performance to illustrate the public health impacts of racialized violence at a National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine convening in Washington, D.C.
Course Development Grants
Since 2014, over 75 faculty members from across the University of Michigan have participated in one of the faculty development programs I designed and managed: the Course Development Grants (2017-present) and the UMS Mellon Faculty Institute on Arts-Academic Integration (2014-2018). In each program, I provided individualized curricular and logistical guidance for faculty who want to learn how to use the performing arts in their pedagogy; these programs have also catalyzed a growing community of practice among U-M faculty committed to arts-integrative teaching.
Some of the new or revised courses from these programs include:
Social Justice, Identity, Diversity, and Community (Michigan Community Scholars Program)
Psychology of Language (Psychology)
Introduction to Fluid Mechanics (Mechanical Engineering)
Structure and Reactivity (Chemistry)
Black France (Romance Languages & Literatures)
Writing in Motion: Composing with Bodies, Words, and Other Media (Lloyd Hall Scholars Program)
Teaching English as a Second Language Internationally (English Language Institute)
Midwifery (School of Nursing)
Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities (School of Public Health)
Landscape, Culture, and Nature (School of Sustainability & the Environment)
Histories of Human Experimentation (LSA Honors Program/ History)
Theories and Practice for Community Action and Social Change (School of Social Work)
Read UMS “Faculty Spotlights” highlighting Course Development Grantees and their teaching projects →
Teaching at Northwestern University
For Northwestern University’s Department of Theatre, I designed and taught four courses on American theatre history and dramaturgy for undergraduate theatre majors. Click on each course title to download the syllabus.
“Pacific Encounters: Imagining Asia in the Musical” traced the shifting depictions of Asian/Pacific Islanders through canonical Western musical theatre texts from the late nineteenth through early 21st centuries.
“Introduction to Dramaturgy” familiarized students with techniques of script analysis, production dramaturgy, new play development, and season planning.
“Eugene O’Neill and His Contemporaries” followed O’Neill’s wide-ranging stylistic experiments from the 1910’s through the 1950s alongside the works of his playwriting peers.
“Chicago Theatre” introduced students to the history of the city’s unique theatre community through in-depth case studies of its major ensembles and their representative playtexts.