{"id":4427,"date":"2021-03-30T12:00:45","date_gmt":"2021-03-30T16:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/websites.emerson.edu\/itg\/?p=4427"},"modified":"2021-04-01T11:55:35","modified_gmt":"2021-04-01T15:55:35","slug":"theodore-regge-life-on-teaching-during-the-pandemic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/websites.emerson.edu\/itg\/theodore-regge-life-on-teaching-during-the-pandemic\/","title":{"rendered":"Theodore \u201cRegge\u201d Life on teaching during the pandemic: the ups, the downs, and takeaways for a post-Covid future"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, we sat down with Theodore \u201cRegge\u201d Life<\/a>, Senior Distinguished Director-in-Residence, VMA to discuss his experiences with teaching during the pandemic over the last year.<\/p>\n

Which courses of yours have you had to redesign since the pandemic started?<\/strong>
\nEverything had to be redesigned (including VM373 Directing Actors for the Screen and VM420 Advanced Directing Actors for the Screen). Nothing could be presented as it was during in-person times.<\/p>\n

In what ways did the need to take your courses online change your course design and\/or approach to teaching?<\/strong>
\nThe first thing I learned is that you can\u2019t lecture on Zoom, you can\u2019t just be the sage on stage as you are in the classroom. Teaching over Zoom really only provides short bursts of information, and the more interactive the better. The breakout rooms<\/a> are invaluable for all my teaching. Any way you can get the students to be interactive is really the trick of online teaching. You really have to be this sort of provocateur, where you say things to provoke responses and interaction, and you put people in breakout rooms in smaller groups where they won\u2019t have to feel like they\u2019re being called out to speak in front of the big group.<\/p>\n

Can you tell me a bit about how you were able to connect your directors and actors virtually?<\/strong>
\nThat\u2019s where the breakout rooms really came in handy. We would all gather in one main room in Zoom, and then very quickly we would create little teams and put them into breakout rooms for 15 or 20 minutes to work on scenes just in their little group. Then, we would come back together in the main room and each group would designate a spokesperson to talk about the experience they had just gone through.<\/p>\n

In a future post-Covid world, do you think you might continue to use any technologies in your course that you’ve become accustomed to during the pandemic?\u00a0<\/strong>
\nZoom can sometimes facilitate things a lot easier than meeting in-person. The thing with my class and working with the acting students is that the two departments (VMA and PA) operate on two completely different schedules. In the past when we were totally in-person, it was often difficult to put the groups together outside of class because of these divergent schedules; directors and actors would end up meeting at bizarre times early in the morning or late at night. Because of Zoom, in moving ahead, that kind of early work\u2014which we call table-read work\u2014that can be done on Zoom, and that way people don\u2019t have to physically meet. You don\u2019t have to factor in travel time and all that stuff, and just maximize all the available time that they have. I think a lot could be done before<\/em> you have to schedule an in-person meeting.<\/p>\n

In your view what have been the most challenging parts of teaching during Covid? Were you able to overcome those challenges?<\/strong>
\nWell yeah, I\u2019m still alive [laughs]. That\u2019s the big overcoming! The tough stuff is that you can use Zoom in the beginning, but at some point you do have to be in-person to do the work in the most effective manner. You can still do the work remotely, but there\u2019s nothing like being in the same room together when you\u2019re actually capturing a scene with equipment.<\/p>\n

Just yesterday, in my Advanced Directing Actors class we were capturing the last project. And, you know, you\u2019re doing your best to keep six feet away and keep everybody six feet away from each other. You forget, because in production you\u2019re trying to get something done and oftentimes you have to break the six-foot rule to get it done. But, we got the final project done in class yesterday; now, they still have to do some projects on their own, and I hope they\u2019ll still try their best to keep the six-foot rule up during production, but that\u2019s hard.<\/p>\n

Aside from using breakout rooms, adding interactive elements to your course, and the increased flexibility Zoom provides, what else would you say has gone well with teaching during Covid? <\/strong>
\nI think that\u2014especially with the students that decided to choose Flex [learning]\u2014it made everybody more serious about it. They wanted the education enough to risk their own health, perhaps, to get it. We all were trying to work together and learn the rules and follow the rules together, because it meant that much to have the education, to have the knowledge that students want when they come to a school like Emerson. Everybody having a little more skin in the game has been a positive. That little extra effort along with making the most of this viral world\u2014those are the things that I\u2019ll always remember.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t as bad as everybody made it out to be when we were getting ready to do this. When we all had to stumble into it last Spring, it was hard because nobody knew what to do, and you\u2019re trying to figure out, \u201cOK, how do I change all this stuff around?\u201d But, resourcefulness happens. I did my Directing Actors as a Summer I course and we were able to do remote production. I discovered these devices that could be programmed by the actors so that they could still do their monologues. There were ways [to do the work] that were created everywhere, not just at Emerson, but in Hollywood, and everywhere in the world. Devices were created and were retrofitted to do that same work\u2014maybe not as well as the human operator, but you could do it. It was about getting the job done.<\/p>\n

Any final thoughts?<\/strong>
\nI\u2019m a kind of a person that\u2019s always looking at the glass half full as opposed to the glass half empty. I\u2019ve tried to harvest from this whole Zoom experience what has worked and what could be a benefit in the future moving forward. Like I said, some things are better online because you\u2019ve got undivided attention in some things. To me, those are timesavers when you realize peoples\u2019 schedules are so complex that organizing stuff meant travel time, and there were other factors. Even this interview we\u2019re conducting right now. In the past it would be \u201cOK, when are you free, when are we going to meet?\u201d. Who knew that we could do all of this completely over Zoom? You\u2019re doing your interview, I\u2019m sharing my comments, nothing more would\u2019ve happened if we met in-person. We couldn\u2019t have improved on it. And that\u2019s the thing we should keep in mind. Maybe all this other stuff we attach to being together is a luxury. We can really get the job done like we have been doing it. Human interaction [in-person] is important and means something too, but again, some of that is a luxury.<\/p>\n

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week, we sat down with Theodore \u201cRegge\u201d Life, Senior Distinguished Director-in-Residence, VMA to discuss his experiences with teaching during the pandemic over the last year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2371,"featured_media":4433,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7,102],"tags":[64,75,94],"class_list":["post-4427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-faculty-showcase","category-zoom","tag-online-learning","tag-showcase","tag-zoom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/websites.emerson.edu\/itg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/websites.emerson.edu\/itg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/websites.emerson.edu\/itg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/websites.emerson.edu\/itg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2371"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/websites.emerson.edu\/itg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4427"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/websites.emerson.edu\/itg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4427\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4473,"href":"https:\/\/websites.emerson.edu\/itg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4427\/revisions\/4473"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/websites.emerson.edu\/itg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/websites.emerson.edu\/itg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/websites.emerson.edu\/itg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/websites.emerson.edu\/itg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}