Teaching and Performing: Ideas for Energizing Your Classes

To be, or not to be: that is the question.

To be a teacher-performer, or not to be?

Authors, Timpson and Burgoyne, assert that teachers are inherently performers and, as such, techniques from the stage enhance and expand their ready repertoire of discipline-based content.

While teachers are trained planners and scholars, very few are trained performers! Using performance theory, the authors show how an educator can transform ordinary classroom experiences into occasions that attract and engage the students.

In this second edition of Teaching and Performing, the authors expand on the possibilities presented by warm-up exercises, role-playing, integrating props and lighting, blocking skills, focusing energy and concentration, and using a variety of other techniques for good teaching (and good theatre!)

William M. Timpson is a Professor in the School of Education at Colorado State University. After receiving his Bachelor’s degree in American History from Harvard University, Bill went on to teach junior and senior high school in the inner city of Cleveland, Ohio before completing a doctoral program in educational psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

After working with teachers and staff at various levels of schooling (K-16) for many years, Bill now specializes in postsecondary instruction, having written several books in this area: Teaching and Learning Peace (2002), Metateaching and the Instructional Map (2000), Teaching and Performing (1997), and Concepts and Choices for Teaching (1996).

Suzanne Burgoyne has been a recipient of Fulbright and Kellogg National fellowships and has studied and taught directing and dramaturgy at the National Theatre Institute of Belgium. She has been editor of Theatre Topics, vice-president for Professional Development for the Association of Theatre in Higher Education, and has published articles on directing and American drama in Theatre Journal, American Drama, Theatre Topics, and Text and Performance Quarterly. A translator of drama by Belgian author Paul Willems, she edited an anthology, Four Plays of Paul Willems (Garland, 1992), and translated another play which appears in Paul Willems' The Drowned Land and La Vita Brevé (Peter Lang, 1994). Burgoyne was a 2000/2001 PEW Carnegie Scholar and was named ATHE's Outstanding Teacher of Theatre in Higher Education in 2003. She is currently conducting research related to the scholarship of teaching! and learning in theatre.