Pedagogy Symposium

44th Mid-America Theatre Conference

Pedagogy Call for Proposals

Deadline for Submissions: November 1, 2023

Click this link for a downloadable PDF of the CFP:  MATC Pedagogy 2024 CFP

For our 2024 annual meeting in Madison, The Pedagogy Symposium of the Mid-America Theatre Conference (MATC) invites proposals for papers, teaching demonstrations, workshops, and roundtable discussions that speak to the current state of affairs in theatre higher education. This year’s “theme-less” conference casts a wider net to allow participants to reflect on how their unique and individual approaches to engaging in classrooms might be lifted to the universal to inform and inspire the broader teaching community. Additionally, the Pedagogy Symposium is excited to again have a Pedagogy Respondent with broad experiences in teaching theatre spanning multiple forms and disciplines who will provide feedback to our presenters to further enhance and improve how we engage with our students.

We welcome investigations into any teaching-related inquiry for our conference in the spring. If you are looking for inspiration, please consider the following prompts as you prepare your submission:

• How do early-career professionals and those just entering academia define teaching styles? How do you essentialize your Teaching Philosophy? What are your go-to lessons for teaching demonstrations while on the job hunt?
• How do our curricula reflect our students’ communities? How do we enfold into our departments the histories and identities that comprise those we educate as well as those doing the educating? What steps do we take to ensure those wide-ranging identities do not disappear into homogeneity?
• How do our curricula reflect our institution’s communities? Do we purposely acknowledge those small enclaves of identities within which our institutions might be located? How do we incorporate into our lessons the populations that surround and incubate our institutions, and what does this look like?
• How do we infuse our syllabi with meaningful attention to theatre-making of the past, present, and future? What theatre has happened in or near our institutions, and what can be learned from those histories? What ways can we include local voices in our lectures and class discussions?
• What methodologies do we employ to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse student population? How do the stories we inspect in our classrooms reflect our students? How do they expose students to different perspectives?
• What goals do we set for our students and for ourselves and how do we measure them? How do we measure success for our students? How do students measure success for themselves? How do we measure our own success and how is that success measured for us by our institutions?
• How do we encourage students to anticipate the future of theatre? What tools do we help students develop to both prepare for and shape that future? 

This year, the Pedagogy Symposium will consist of the following presentation opportunities. Please consider which format best fits your submission:

• Teaching Demonstration: new to the Pedagogy Symposium this year, we invite graduate students and other early-career professionals to test out their job-talk. Panelists will share a shortened version (15-20 minutes) of their teaching demo and/or their scholarship presentation and receive feedback from the audience, including the Pedagogy Respondent.
• Single Paper for a Panel Presentation: a 15-20-minute talk (7-10-page papers followed by questions/answers). Panels of 3-4 will be assembled by the chairs or may be proposed by those submitting.
• Participation in a Roundtable Discussion: 5-7 panelists discuss a jointly proposed or similarly identified topic (written paper/presentation of 8-10 minutes)
• Workshop: solo (60-minute) or shared (30-minute) sessions involving engaged participation from the audience

MATC commits to advancing intersectional equity, inclusivity, diversity, and justice; to creating a conference that is welcoming and fully accessible, and to disrupting the ongoing damage of white supremacy within MATC and the broader academic and theatrical worlds. As part of this effort, we highly encourage a broad range of submissions by presenters or about theatre of historically disenfranchised and underrepresented populations, particularly those of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color communities. To request specific conference accommodations, please contact our Accessibility Officer at access@matc.us. MATC prohibits discrimination and harassment of any kind, including during all associated meetings, the annual conference sessions, and within publications. For MATC’s full statement on anti-racism, accessibility, and inclusivity, please see our website at http://matc.us.

When submitting a proposal, you will be asked to supply:

• Name, academic affiliation (if any), position title, and email for all participants
• A paper/presentation title
• An abstract (250 words)
• A presentation format (teaching demonstration, paper for full panel presentation, participation in a roundtable discussion, or workshop)
• A brief biography for all participants
• Any spatial or audiovisual requests for your presentation on your submission form.
• We cannot guarantee AV support but will consider requests when scheduling.

Please submit proposals by Wednesday, November 1, 2023 at 11:59pm PST via the online form available below

Questions? Feel free to email the co-chairs listed below with any concerns: pedagogy@matc.us

Collin Vorbeck	Slade Billew
Blackburn College	Stephen F. Austin State University
collin.vorbeck@blackburn.edu	billewbs@sfasu.edu

Please submit electronically via the online form below: