“Intentional Co-Evolution: Towards an Impact- Aware, Collaborative Voice Pedagogy”
Co-Presenters: Ashleigh Reade (Boston University), Michael Shipley (Utah State University), Anne Thibault (Eastern Illinois University)
The following blog post summarizes my contribution to the panel presentation “Intentional Co-Evolution: Towards an Impact- Aware, Collaborative Voice Pedagogy”:
My goal is to describe some specifics of my continuing evolution toward student-centered pedagogy in the voice/speech classroom. It’s worth noting that I was trained under a series of more traditional guru/disciple-style relationships. As someone with socially dominant identities and speech norms, this model did not particularly “other” me in terms of instructional content, but aspects of the training were still harmful and problematic. In my classroom, I am committed to pursuing a pedagogy that is culturally sustaining and just.
The strategies I have employed over the past several years fall into two categories: general pedagogy/learning environment adjustments and instructional content. My general pedagogical adjustments have included a focus on student-led assessment (I have been ungrading and speaking about ungrading since 2019) and an emerging practice of community norms that encourage student ownership of the learning environment.
My adjustments to instructional content include a collaborative voice pedagogy that invites students to co-author assignments. The basic invitation is this:
Please help me make this assignment useful for your learning. Here are X options for your engagement/variations on the deliverable. Please feel free to suggest another option that I may not have considered!
The problem with this approach has been that students often don’t have a clear understanding of our larger project, so they don’t know how to adapt assignments to meet their learning goals in an innovative way. If I am asking students to step into more expertise/responsibility, I must give them a starting point and some scaffolding. I can’t simply hand over the keys and say, “You drive the bus.” Unfortunately, this was the unintended consequence of my first attempts at co-authoring curriculum with my students.
Co-authorship depends on students having at least some expert context for voice and speech and an idea of where we are heading with the training curriculum. It’s important to me that I remain focused on training actors– students haven’t signed up to be voice and speech trainers– but students can be more engaged learners if they have context for the training, see some of the culminating performance products that are possible for them down the road, and learn some critical vocabulary beyond “good voice/bad voice”. If I frontload this context, students can get more out of the entire curriculum.
The assignment arc that is intended accomplish this is something I am provisionally calling “Voices in the Wild”.
First, as I have done for many semesters now, I ask students to do some creative writing about their voices. In the first week, students write a short “Artist Statement” using some structured free-writing and a clear series of prompts that result in a short, five-sentence statement. This statement becomes a laboratory text for a guided performance/presence exercise in Week 1, but more importantly, it is a short piece of personal text that can be used as a reference text during exercises throughout the course. (Thanks to Robert Sussuma for the concept of the “reference” performance.)
Students also write a “Voice Haiku” using a process similar to the one suggested in “Preparation for the Work” in Kristin Linklater’s Freeing the Natural Voice. For reasons articulated by our keynote speaker Christine Hamel, this exercise feels problematic and I too have adapted it for my classroom. (From my point of view, the underlying rhetoric of the original exercise can be experienced as, “Your voice sucks now. It could be better…but you’re the problem.” My adaptation focuses student attention not primarily on internal blocks to vocal expressivity, but on current and potential vocal assets, as well as community support.) The Voice Haiku is another piece of writing that students can use throughout the semester as a reference text during exercises.
Next, I ask students to submit a series of YouTube links, via Google form, that I use to populate several playlists for in-class listening. The prompts include:
- A voice you like
- A voice you don’t like
- A voice that makes you feel…(fill in the blank!)
- A voice that sounds like home
- A voice whose identity presentation or lived experience is different than your own
- An iconic voice
In listening to and discussing these voices, we focus on two things. First, we are developing, with my expert support, an objective rubric for how one might describe a voice. What are we literally hearing, in terms of acoustic realities and the likely physiological parameters that result in those acoustic outputs? What objective, even scientific, language can we use to describe a voice? How might that inform our work as we seek an expansive expressive palette and access to new vocal choices?
But just as importantly, we discuss our subjective experiences of these voices and the stories that emerge from our listening. In these discussions, we may tiptoe into the territory of our own implicit bias, we begin to unpack socialized norms and tropes, and we start to reference and experience the concept of “vocal generosity’ that Hamel proposes in her book Sounding Voices.
Using our new, shared, critical vocabulary, students can now embark on a vocal self-inventory where they name the objective features of their voices, the subjective aspects of their vocal experience, and vocal intersections with their identities. At this point, we are ready to “do voice work” in the traditional sense of engaging in physical exercises and building vocal skills, but we can do it from an informed perspective, a perspective that has already celebrated, in specific ways, the students’ vocal assets, and a perspective that encourages curiosity and exploration. We try on vocal qualities and characters, develop physical skills and vocal dexterity, and expand our vocal senses of self without implicitly demanding erasure or assimilation of our current vocal identities. We are, in a sense, exploring vocal dramaturgy alongside vocal skills.
The Voices in the Wild arc culminates in an end-of-semester devised vocal ensemble performance. Students are given in-class rehearsal time to prepare a showcase of a broad range of objective vocal features and subjective characters/stories, using artist statements, voice haikus, excerpts from monologues or scenes, or other text. The students perform in a circle, with invited audience members forming a “village” around the participants. This performance is a celebration of vocal diversity, vocal agency, vocal identity, and vocal artistry.
The Voices in the Wild assignment arc frames all the other work done in semester one voice. Through this exercise, I can be explicit about my own aesthetic, training toward vocal values I find useful for an actor such as efficiency and spontaneity, without denying that I have biases or implicitly claiming that other choices in the space are not valid, artistic, or useful. It is a framing device that allows me to present the more traditional physical training regimen of voice class in a contextualized, dramaturgical way that makes room for a multiplicity of expressions.