Goals

Guinier chose to teach a graduate seminar as a way to explore these issues in a different venue.
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She used an experimental format with an initially skeptical group of 15 graduate students who came to Cornell University for a critical perspectives summer seminar at the School of Criticism and Theory. The students came from disciplines of literary theory, sociology, political theory and theater. Initially students, caught up in the jargon of their discipline, had trouble communicating. Guinier used a format that required eye-to-eye contact and interactive conversation. This enabled experimentation and intellectual exchange across disciplines. Rather than compete or perform, students began to build on each other’s ideas. Students rotated responsibility for developing background reading assignments, for planning the lesson and facilitating discussion among the students. The use of experimental formats also made teaching intellectually serious graduate students exciting, even fun.

Active Learning: Theater As Pedagogy

One of the graduate students, Tim Mitchell, introduced Guinier and the class to the techniques of Brazilian director Augusto Boal: image theater and forum theater.

Image Theater: Participants present images of ideas in silence to the rest of the class.

The use of nonverbal images brings in a visual element that can

	disrupt or highlight existing assumptions and hierarchies and
	help participants communicate across disciplinary and other barriers.

Teachers and students play interchangeable roles: each is a “physical form” that can be molded by the artist-participant, and each is capable of becoming the artist-participant and molding the other bodies.

Image Theater has great value in many different settings because it:

	introduces an alternate form of communication where language is hardened, overused or even dangerous
	gives participants a new way to control their “own meaning”
	respects the varying “literacy” levels and cultural experiences of all participants
	helps to subvert traditional group dynamics so that no one person dominates the conversation

Forum Theater creates scenes of specific challenges or conflict that an actor or group of actors must overcome. The audience first views a scene of a protagonist failing to overcome the challenge. The moderator, called a “joker” invites audience members to participate in solving the conflict by standing up and putting themselves in the scene. Once the audience member intervenes, the joker leads a discussion of the proposed solution and asks for more solutions.
… more on Forum Theater in a Community Setting

“The subject was the relationship between race, gender and power. It was a big room with black walls and no windows. He told us to dress in comfortable clothes. He then played warm-up games to relax us. He had us gradually create physical images of the word power…
… more on Theater as Pedagogy

Bryonn Bain, a former student, has used many of the same power sharing techniques to teach a spoken word poetry class at NYU. Bain uses small groups, concrete exercises requiring group problem solving and theatre techniques to create learning communities in which conflict and collaboration are used to fuel creative expression and foster activism.