I am excited to welcome Dr. Danielle McGeough to the podcast! Danielle is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Media in the College of Humanities, Arts, & Sciences at the University of Northern Iowa. She teaches courses in cultural performance, performance and social change, and qualitative research. Danielle also co-hosts a podcast called Bachademia with our previous guest Teaching in Ten guest, Dr. Bill Henninger.
In this episode, Danielle explores how we can create classroom spaces that are safe, inclusive, and creative. She first provides clear examples of how we might use our course syllabus and policies as an invitation to students for how we want to learn together and interact. Danielle then offers ways that we can make our teaching more multi-modal and open-ended. She describes the power of performance and how performance is a method, object, and a way to present what we are learning. Drawing upon Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, Danielle challenges us to see how performance and especially play can be relevant in our classrooms, regardless of our discipline.
For more about Danielle, check out her personal website “Sensing Possibility" or her book titled, Gender and Communication: A Critical Introduction.
If you want to learn more about Augusto Boal and the Theatre of the Oppressed check out this article about a series of workshops he gave at Harvard University or his book, titled, Theatre of the Oppressed.