Unpacking a Text

Kate Burke, Associate Professor of Drama; Past President Voice and Speech
    Trainers Association, Inc. (VASTA)

At this workshop, faculty and graduate student participants will learn how to help students respond more actively and immediately to an unfamiliar text by quickly discovering its spoken rhythm. Using group readings of a text as a point of departure, participants will try out various text-exploration techniques to enter the reading through several “doors” and from different points of view. Through such techniques, the expert—in our case, the teacher—can give students a visceral experience of textual devices before calling them by name or analyzing them. This highly interactive workshop is ideal for teachers who work with literary texts in any academic discipline; the techniques have proven especially helpful for dense, complicated, and/or period texts. Participants in earlier, similar workshops rated them 4.9/5 and offered comments such as these:

• “I don’t have an acting bone in my body, but Kate made it fun to work on the text aloud.”
• “Speaking Henry IV’s speech in so many different ways gave me lots of ideas about how better to teach poetry.”
• “Now I know how to get my students to see that a poem is meant to be spoken and heard.”

Sponsored by the Teaching Resource Center.