Project Objectives:
The main objective of this Internationalizing the Curriculum grant was to help change significant components of my Disability Culture undergraduate and postgraduate classes, to reflect a more international framework. Cross-cultural comparisons and a wider range of art practices reflecting work outside of the US offered my students ways to engage with different conceptions of human rights, forms of embodiment, ways of understanding normalcy and disability, and the intersection between arts policy, funding structures and aesthetics. The other main objective was to experiment with newer forms of classroom pedagogy, and find useful ways of incorporating mechanisms like Skype into classroom teaching.
Project Achievements:
With the grant, I was able to visit disability arts archives in Europe, participate in two international dance masterclasses (one in Oakland, US, and one in London, UK), and connect with international disability art specialists at the International Federation for Theatre Research conference in Barcelona, Spain. In our classes, we experimented with different set-ups for Skyping with class guests. Our Skype visits were very successful, and allowed US-based students to see the differences in how disability (and the arts) are conceived in other parts of the world. We brought in a poet/activist from Jakarta, Indonesia; a researcher from Switzerland who shared with us inside information about festival circuits and the positioning of international disability arts and artists in the ‘high art’ market; and a theatre group of people with cognitive differences, from Aotearoa/New Zealand. For this last, very festive visit, all company members gathered for a breakfast in Christchurch, and then engaged with our class in a lively discussion – and the impact both on the Ann Arbor and the Christchurch group was a delight to witness, each finding affirmation and connection with the other. We also engaged with a CRLT specialist half-way along the course, to help us measure the impact of our internationalization work.
Continuation:
As a very hands-on, embodied pedagogy teacher, I was a bit leery of using a lot of Skype in my classrooms. But this project has transformed my view of the value of these technologies, and I am building more of these engagements into my classrooms. I still want to balance live engagement and cyber work, but the translation of spirit and energy from one place to the other was palpable and clear.
Dissemination:
Some of my students and I shared the results of our learning experiments with the Disability Culture Salon, a group of faculty and graduate students from the UM, EMU, and Toledo. I am also hosting a Disability Culture Pedagogy Roundtable at the annual Society for Disability Studies Conference in June 2014, and I will talk about our experiments.
Advice to your Colleagues:
In finding ways of incorporating Skype, we learned that we needed to set up question and response structures, to allow both sides to feel seen and able to respond, so we experimented with readings, question sets, and live art presentations. Only one of our presenters was a traditional academic with a Powerpoint, the others shared themselves in very different formats. I encourage colleagues to think about set-up – how will the ‘talking head’ aesthetic of Skype work for your class? Are there ways of playing with that? One of our guests Skyped from her bed, and shared with us what it was like to be a travelling artist/activist in Indonesia by waving her laptop around her, showing where she was. The Christchurch group arranged themselves in such a way that the computer camera became a theatre spectator, and actors moved back and forth from a surrounding circle to the ‘interview’ position. All of these ways of working with the technology were really useful, and mitigated any ‘talky’ fatigue my students might otherwise have experienced. We also experimented with forms of note-taking during these sessions: we used mind-maps as ways of keeping track of our learning, and compared our mind-maps and how they work best in the sessions following our guest slots.
