Student-Centered Learning
How To Break A Leg--In Three Languages
Imagine writing emails, designing clothes, or developing marketing campaigns—all in an unfamiliar language.
The Department of Romance Languages and Literatures offers students these very types of immersion experiences through courses that challenge Notre Dame French, Spanish, and Italian students to relate to each other using a second language that comes alive through performance.
Students in the Department of Romance Language and Literatures can take a one-credit “French Theatre Production” course or two-credit Italian or Spanish Theatre Workshops. Each class is a collaboration between pioneering faculty members and energetic students – with one caveat: Students must agree never to use English while discussing course business.
In 1991, then-chairperson of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Jo Ann DellaNeva, asked Paul McDowell, a newly hired associate professional specialist, to create a French theatre course. McDowell, believing that theatre must be acted, created a course in which he would direct students in a 17th century French play by social satirist, Moliére.
“In 1991 no one knew me—the course didn’t exist,” says McDowell. “The class made it up as we went along. The first students were pioneers. They had no idea what would come of it.”
What’s Come Of It…
For twelve of the past fourteen years, the French Theatre Production Company, l'Illustre Théâtre de Notre Dame du Lac, has performed one of Moliére’s works. Over 100 undergraduates have staged their plays in a range of campus venues and the past two performances have taken place in the technically advanced Philbin Studio Theatre in the DeBartolo Center for the Performing Arts.
“French Theatre Production” also inspired other visionaries to create similar courses in Italian and Spanish. In 2001, Laura Colangelo, a senior film, television, and theatre and Italian double major, asked Colleen Ryan-Scheutz, assistant professor of Italian, to advise her senior thesis—directing an Italian play. The experiment was successful, and in addition to co-publishing an article detailing the experience with Ryan-Scheutz, Colangelo returned the following year to direct another performance.
Now in its third year, the Spanish Theatre Workshop was created by Kelly Kingsbury, who, throughout her undergraduate and graduate education at Notre Dame, had desired a Spanish Theatre course.
While the French Theatre Production class performs centuries-old works in verse, and the Italian Workshop performs more contemporary plays, the Spanish workshop has experimented with a range of works. Their performances have included entremeses, one-act comic plays, by Cervantes and “La fuente de los sauces,” a modern children’s fairy tale. The Spanish Theatre Workshop performance is also accompanied by a screening of a student-produced telenovela, a Spanish-language soap opera.
Living the Language
The theatre workshops form a community of learners and require a great deal of collaboration, leading the instructors to agree that students become fully immersed in a foreign language and culture.
“The course allows students to take language and literature off the page and become the masters of it—mind, body, and spirit,” says Ryan-Scheutz. “They begin to think and feel like Italians over the last few, culminating weeks.”
“The plays have given me a very profound sense for the beauty of French,” says Anne Macrander, a senior, who has acted in two French plays. “Instead of seeing it as a system of subjects, verb conjugations, and the infamous subjunctive, Moliére gave me the image of the French language as music; language welded with talent is incredibly powerful.”
The courses benefit the instructors, as well.
“The theatre workshop allows me as an instructor to meet students where they are, to get to know them and their abilities closely, and to build on those abilities in a way that is difficult to do in a classroom where you have 20 students trying to study the same thing out of the same textbook at the same time,” says Kingsbury.
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