Teaching Public History and Performance During the Pandemic
How do you teach performing public history when in-person classes are not permitted due to the pandemic? Carleton University History Professor David Dean’s graduate seminar, Narrativity and Performance in Public History has had to be online for at least the first half of the current Winter 2022 semester. For a class that depends on in-person meetings, hands-on workshops, activities, and trips to theatre productions, this was going to be a serious challenge. Thanks to Carleton University’s Students as Partners Program (SaPP), Ms. Andrea Villasmil, a third-year undergraduate student, took on the task of working with David to come up with a solution. In this blog post, Andrea describes her experience, bookended by a short explanation of the course and a report on how it worked in practice by David.