Congratulations to Devin Miranda-Weise Klugh who on Thursday, April 17, 2025, successfully defended her dissertation. The title of Devin’s dissertation is: "THE PANDEMIC, PRECARITY, AND PEDAGOGY OF HOPE: PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOL THEATRE TEACHERS' EXPERIENCES OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC."
This critical qualitative inquiry aimed to document, describe, and highlight the experiences of public high school theatre teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic. The theoretical and conceptual frameworks are situated within the literature of critical pedagogy, pedagogy of hope, and precarity and the works of Paolo Freire, Augusto Boal, and bell hooks. Twelve public high school theatre teachers, from a variety of school settings and stages of their careers, participated in one-on-one Zoom interviews. These interviews were semi-structured and sought to explore the teacher’s experiences and stories of pandemic pedagogy, precarity, resilience, and the uniqueness of the transition of theatre to distance and later hybrid delivery. The interviews were transcribed and then analyzed using a critical lens and manual coding. Three themes emerged from the data: necessity, improvisation, and heartbreak. Though theatre teachers experienced challenges and even heartbreak during the pandemic, they used improvisation to create spaces and opportunities for their students to engage with theatre, which was necessary during this dark, isolating, and scary time. By looking at how theatre teachers adapted and improvised to meet the needs of their students while following changing and sometimes conflicting guidelines and guardrails, we can better prepare teachers to handle the unexpected. Theatre is more important than ever as a place to hope, imagine a brighter future, and transform our realities.
Dissertation Committee Chair(s):
Dr. Susan V. Iverson
Dissertation Committee Member(s):
Dr. Mary Coakley-Fields
Dr. Jeffrey Kaplan
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