Theatre and Modern Arts Festival as the Pedagogy of Social Practice & Cultural Critique

This project seeks to use “theatre”and “modern arts festivals” as the pedagogy for social practice and cultural critique, as well as the means for interdisciplinary learning. I will combine a long-taught course “Literature at Theatre” as well as a newly created course “Culture and Industry,”using them as my teaching methods research field. My research aims at creating a series of courses that can both reinforce students’ creative capacities, critical thingkings, and their cross-fields learning abilities. To increase student learning effects and to foster new pedagogical strategies, I will extend and revise the teaching methods recently developed, i.e., the “student-center learning” as well as “practice-as-research.” Theatre expertise as well as art festival curators will be invited to give students intensive workshop on theatre productions and seminars on selected topics of festival managements and critical research. My own creation of “Evaluation for Self Learning”and “Deep Interview” will also be employed in both classes to encourage students to set and/or re-evaluate their own learning goals on designated dates, approximately once every three weeks throughout the whole semester. The objective is to prepare students with the methods and skills of self-learning, enhancing their learning effect on campus and in the future. The courses proposed in this project will also be opened to my English-majored students, students of our new program of non-majored liberal arts, as well as students from other colleges on campus; the objective is to hopefully foster an interdisciplinary environment, where students enrolled may obtain skills of cross-field co-learning and collaboration.