Pre-Conference Workshop (Optional)
Building Rapport and Creating Community: What Standup Comedy and Acting Can Teach Us about Student Engagement
John Watts and Joshua Vossler
Thursday, May 2nd, 1:30 - 4:00 p.m.
Sheraton Nashville Downtown Hotel
$95 per person
***Register using this online form***
Feeling a little self-conscious and awkward? Well, you picked the right profession, but it doesn’t mean you can’t be interesting and entertaining in front of students. Come and learn what actors and stand-up comics can teach you about embracing your individuality and building rapport with students. Stand-up comedy and acting aren’t just about making people laugh or being the center of attention. Rather, these fields have found ways to enhance communication and knit individuals into groups.
Stand-up comics learn to develop and communicate a memorable and charismatic persona that encourages their audiences to identify with the comic’s perspective. Actors become skilled at building rapport with other actors and even audience members to make stories feel alive and real. As teachers, we can borrow those techniques to improve the quality of our lessons and to just have more fun in the classroom. Students must believe that good research habits are worth exercising, despite their cost in energy and time. This belief hinges on their attitudes toward research, which hinge on their degree of engagement in the classroom and their perceptions of the people teaching them. Always making a good impression is hard, maybe impossible, but there are ways to stack the deck in our favor.
In this workshop, we’ll draw from acting and stand-up comedy to develop methods and materials that will bring some fun into your lesson plans and help you create and maintain a positive atmosphere in your classroom. There will be a series of exercises that will help you learn and practice a variety of skills employed by stand-up comics and actors that are relevant to creating effective and pleasant college learning experiences.
Learning Outcomes:
Attendees will...
- identify warmups and improvisational games suitable for their instructional needs in order to prepare for classroom presentations.
- complete an exercise to create analogies related to information literacy in order to scaffold complex concepts.
- use a formula to create a self-introduction for in-person instruction in order to build rapport.
- perform self-introductions in order to receive feedback from an audience of peers.
Payment
Payment can be made by check, Visa or MasterCard.
- Mail or fax (734-487-1289) the LOEX 2013 Pre-Conference Workshop Payment Form.
- To pay with a credit card by phone, call 734-487-2633.
- There is no online payment option for the pre-conference.
- You will not be sent a formal invoice; once you are registered, just please pay using the form.
