Teaching

I guide students to discover their own identities as learners—independently and collaboratively. I create inclusive, collaborative learning environments that value all students as contributors to the development of our knowledge and skills. Projects in my courses, whether they be papers, projects, or performances, are always for real audiences, to accomplish real goals. I emphasize that student work is more than a final product, but also a process of discovery, testing new ideas. No matter the course I teach, I encourage students to establish their own learning objectives within the structures of the course that help them meet their personal and professional goals.

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Interdisciplinary Studies in Liberal Arts

I currently teach at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in the Interdisciplinary Studies in Liberal Arts Department. This quarter, I am teaching a senior seminar titled Mobile Audio Theatre that synthesizes scholarship and practice from the fields of theatre, sound studies, and cultural geography.

First Year Writing

I taught Introduction to Academic Inquiry and Writing for three years at the University of New Haven. In my most recent iteration of the course, I taught students the methods and style of authoethnography. By writing about a subculture of which they are a part, students learned how to use their own experiences to write meaningfully for specific audiences. In my first year teaching at the University of New Haven, I won the Johnson Family Award for Excellence in Teaching of First-Year Writing.

I previously taught First Year Writing at the Northwestern University to Theatre majors in a class that also served as an introduction to play analysis.

The 2018 Johnson Family Award Winners for the University of New Haven Writing Programs

Discussing interviewing techniques for the autoethnography assignment

Academic Research & Project Management

In my first two and half years teaching Academic Research and Project Management (a course taken by all students in their first year at the University of New Haven), I rose from instructor, to a primary Team Leader and Curriculum Designer, to the Assistant Director of the program. In this course, 80 students meet together in a lecture hall once a week to be co-taught by four instructors from different departments and backgrounds. Then, during the other weekly class meeting, students break into four groups of 20 to meet with one instructor each. In this video, I use the Harry Potter Alliance to introduce students to approaching the process of solving real world problems through research, team work, and passion. 

Digital Humanities Lab

The Digital Humanities Lab is taught by several instructors each semester, each introducing students to digital tools. We then serve as mentors to students on research projects that they design. In the DHL, I have introduced students to:

• Binaural recording
• Sound editing
• Google Tour Creator to make experimental art
• Practice-based research methodologies

View Dr. Lauren Beck's presentation, "Practice as Research: Creating New Knowledge with Audio Recording and Editing."

Interdisciplinary Theatre Courses

I designed two interdisciplinary theatre courses for the Honors Program. In "Ototheatre: Creating Mobile Audio Performances," based on my dissertation research, students learn theories of theatre and sound studies and skills in audio recording and editing. They create their own ototheatrical works located on the University of New Haven campus. I also designed co-teach a course called, "Dramatically Different Math," with a professor of mathematics. In this course, students focus on the topic of infinity, learning both mathematical concepts as well as dramaturgical strategies for interrogating the history and performance of those concepts.

Intimate Performance

While I was at Northwestern, I designed and taught a class called, "Intimate Performance," which focused on putting theatrical theories into practice. In the course, taught in a black box theatre, we spent one day a week reading and discussing theories related to intimacy in theatre and performance (including autobiographical performance, theatre spaces, site-specificity, technology, audience participation, audience safety, and more.) During the next day of the week, student groups took over the class, designing activities and performances that put the theories into practice. For the final projects, students adapted and performed sections of August Strindberg's A Dream Play. The resulting performances were some of the best works of theatre I have seen.  

You are welcome to download the syllabus for Intimate Performance.