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Collaboration has really become an essential part of my teaching of my courses.
And it works at a lot of different levels.
Primarily, in my large G.U.R. course, I have two assignments
which encourages them, even forces them, to collaborate in several different ways.
The first assignment is a dramatic presentation portfolio.
And in this assignment, they have to choose one play, in a group, a group of about five or six students.
They have to choose one play.
And in this play, they have to do a presentation.
What's important is that I don't want them to do the whole play and I don't want them to summarize the play
or do a highlights kind of thing of the play where they do one famous scene after another.
What they need to do is focus on one little fifteen-minute section.
And they need to come up with a new way of interpreting it.
I ask them to think about a 20th century adaptation of the play; how would they set this play in the 20th century.
That forces them to not just accept what words are there and what stage directions are there
and what assumptions that they had about the play, but to think creatively about how they would set this play into motion.
And I ask them to think about how they could present this in such a way that the
rest of their classmates are going to see the play in a new way.
It's going to shed new light upon the play, they're going to really give it a twist,
they're going to give it a spin that they haven't seen before.
And they work on that in groups; they divide up as people acting as a director or a couple of directors, as set designers.
And then they have to write, as a group, about each aspect that they worked on in the play;
about why their set was the way it was,
about why they portrayed the characters the way they did,
about why they edited the text the way they did.
Because I encourage them to do creative editing, because that's,
like most contemporary productions of Shakespeare, they're not done of a whole text but of an edited text.
So I ask them to write about each part of that
so that the students have to work collaboratively to put on this production,
but they also have to work collaboratively to write.