ruminators' ilk

PLAYING AS PEDAGOGY

Role-playing and playful experimentation in the classroom.

Playing as Pedagogy


Wanda Corn, the Robert and Ruth Halperin
Professor in Art History, was a bit daunted when
she was asked to speak at the Center for Teaching
and Learning's "Award-Winning Teachers on
Teaching" series, she confessed during her May 4
presentation.

The recipient of a 2001 Phi Beta Kappa teaching
award and a Graves Award for outstanding teaching
in the humanities, Corn is an expert on American
art. She described herself as a self-taught
teacher. During more than three decades of
teaching-including 26 years at Stanford-she has
never had so much as a single class on pedagogy,
she said. "I had very few of what I would call
fine teachers in my college years or even-if I
must admit it-in graduate school," she added. She
said she used the sermons of her father, a
Congregational minister, as models and relied on
intuition and trial and error for the rest.

But Corn, who earned her undergraduate and
graduate degrees from New York University, used
the invitation to talk as an opportunity to dig
around in her old notes and recreate her own
growth as a teacher, she said. As she did, she
discovered that she had used role-playing as an
instructional tool over the years, and adopted it
as a kind of "homegrown" pedagogy. Her talk,
"Playing as Pedagogy," served not only as an
exposition of Corn's interactive classroom
techniques but also as a mini-retrospective of
her teaching career.

She was terrified during her first year of
teaching at Washington Square College, where she
barely lifted her eyes from her lecture notes,
Corn recalled. "I mimicked my teachers, who
rattled on for a hour," she said. "They always
came in suits-they were always men-and it was a
formal occasion."

After earning her doctorate, Corn traveled west
with her husband, history lecturer Joe Corn, to
the University of California-Berkeley for his
doctoral studies. Their arrival on the Berkeley
campus in 1969 came at a "charged moment," when
experimentation was not only in the air, it was
de rigueur, Corn said. Her husband's PhD
constituted a "second education" for her and
inspired her to think about art history in ways
other than as a "rhetoric of connoisseurship,"
Corn said. "There was a concern then that the way
we were teaching art history was not accessible."

Corn's own use of experiential teaching began at
Mills College in Oakland, where Corn taught from
1970 to 1980. Mills was undergoing its own
transformation, from a "girl's school" to
"women's college," Corn said, and the faculty was
"very much intent upon reshaping every aspect of
the education our students got."

In her art history classes there, Corn asked
students to figuratively step inside the minds of
19th-century French neoclassicist and Romantic
painters by imagining how Jacques-Louis David and
Eugène Delacroix might have composed a history
painting, and then staging live tableaux.
Students learned about cubism by creating cubist
works and immersed themselves in surrealism by
participating in "Surrealist Nights," complete
with costumes, student artwork and cutouts of
pictures of disembodied eyeballs and mouths
presented as canapés.

Despite student enthusiasm for such
assignments-and her view of her Mills years as
"magical"-Corn put such playful experimentation
behind her when she began teaching at Stanford in
1980. The times had changed, she said. "I wasn't
at Berkeley anymore. We had gotten past what
people called the sixties-which was really the
1970s."

Or so she thought. Over the years, little by
little, pieces of those assignments kept popping
up alongside more traditional lectures and
assignments in her art history classes at
Stanford, she said.

For example, Corn asks students to take a
position and re-enact the debate between the
regionalists and the abstractionists when
teaching about 20th-century American art, or to
re-argue the 1878 libel case the American painter
James Whistler brought against the critic John
Ruskin. She's asked students to write in the
voice of the French philosopher Denis Diderot and
to create prose portraits of painters in the
style of Gertrude Stein, which they then read,
imitating Stein's distinctive elocutionary style.

For her course Transatlantic Modernism: Paris and
New York in the Early 20th Century, Corn pulls
out all the stops. She dresses like Gertrude
Stein and invites her students and their guests
to come in costume for an evening "Chez Stein,"
with a student-created, modernist portrait as the
price of admission. "We've had a Josephine Baker
in a banana skirt, and there is always a Marcel
Duchamp or two-or three or four," she said. One
year, she even borrowed a white poodle from a
friend, in honor of Stein's pet poodle.

Such assignments, which Corn introduces mid-term
and which she usually doesn't grade, require
students to think outside the academic box, she
said. Most are shared or group assignments, so
that students have an opportunity to learn from
each other.

They also make some students extremely anxious,
she said. "I don't remember anyone at Mills
wondering how they would be evaluated on such
assignments, but I do remember a lot of Stanford
students asking me that question."

Although there are as many "ordinary" days as
extraordinary ones in her classroom, Corn has
noted that the things her students have learned
experientially tend to stay in their memory
banks, she said.
And she has had the pleasure of a former student
re-introducing herself with the words: "I was the
student in the banana skirt."

USING POWERPOINT TO PLAY EDUCATIONAL GAMES

This link comes from the Center for Teaching and Learning, University of Minnesota.

I acquired this link from Eugenia Conway, econway@nmsu.edu and the POD list.

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Using PowerPoint to Play Educational Games