Episode Transcript
[Podcast Introduction]
Victoria Robinson:
[instrumental music] Welcome to the Pedagogy Podcast. A discussion of equity, inclusion, and justice in the classroom at UC Berkeley, hosted by me Victoria Robinson, Director of the American Cultures Center.
Marisella Rodriguez:
And me Marisella Rodriguez, senior consultant at the Center for Teaching and Learning.
Victoria Robinson:
This collaboration is spotlighting the American Culture’s Excellence in Teaching Awardees in 2021, in celebration of the 30th anniversary of the American Cultures Center. The AC Center supports faculty members from over 50 departments across campus teaching courses developed to meet the AC requirement, which is the only campus-wide requirement for all students addressing issues central to understanding race and culture and inviting UC Berkeley as a community of staff and students and faculty into analyses critical to our complex, diverse worlds.
Marisella Rodriguez:
The Center for Teaching and Learning Partners with campus educators to inspire, enrich, and innovate Berkeley's collective teaching and learning community. Our work on campus is informed by the idea that effective teaching is learned and improved over time. Each of our guests have demonstrated this same commitment to progressive refinement, especially as it relates to equity inclusion and justice-oriented teaching strategies.
Marisella Rodriguez:
In this episode, we're excited to be joined by SanSan Kwan, associate professor in theater, dance, and performance studies. Welcome SanSan.
[Interview Begins]
SanSan Kwan:
Hi, everyone. First of all, I want to thank the American Cultures Center and the Center for Teaching and Learning, for giving me this great honor, this teaching award. I'm really excited and yeah, happy to talk to you about my teaching.
Marisella Rodriguez:
Great. Well, maybe we should kick it off by sharing a few key things about the award that you received SanSan, you, and others that will be joining us in the future. Victoria, would you like to speak a bit about the AC Excellence in Teaching Award and its purpose?
Victoria Robinson:
Yeah, we're so thrilled that Professor Kwan, Professor Kosek, and Professor de Kosnik have been awarded the 2020-2021 Teaching Excellence Award for American Cultures, which is really to recognize the innovative and transformative space of the American Cultures classroom as part of the undergraduate Berkeley curriculum. And it's really recognizing some particularly salient factors which are a commitment to amplifying and lifting up the multi, multivocality of America's diverse social fabric and also the ways in which our intersectional lives and ways of being really inform our relationships to each other and to the socio-political, socio-emotional ways of our of our lives and think about how we communicate with each other.
Victoria Robinson:
What are the ways in which we listen and live and love and work alongside and with each other? What are those relationships and how do we build them? And Professor Kwan, you're being recognized for the excellence that you bring into the classroom in allowing all those those pieces of a very complicated and heavy classroom space to take place, which is a difficult enterprise.
Victoria Robinson:
So I'm wondering perhaps maybe the first kind of question we can engage you with or just ask you to share: What are the courses that you teach at UC Berkeley and what in particular shapes the classroom for you?
SanSan Kwan:
Oh, thanks for asking. I sort of straddle several different areas of the department. I teach dance studies at the undergraduate and graduate level, so that's the kind of academic, theoretical, and historical side of looking at dance as as an expressive culture. But I also have a background as a professional dancer, so I teach dance technique as well in the studio, and I have a degree in performance studies.
SanSan Kwan:
That's actually where my Ph.D. is located. So I also teach classes in performance studies and performance theory at the graduate level.
Marisella Rodriguez:
I've had the honor of seeing you perform in a different space, a campus space. And it was just and this is over Zoom. So even more challenging. And it was so wonderful to see you and your colleagues convey that emotion and that depth of your performance. I was in my living room and I felt it. I felt the chills.
Marisella Rodriguez:
So thank you. I can only imagine what that's like as a student of yours and in the classroom and how you support students to convey that same level of emotion. I would just love to hear more about specifically the course that you received this award for. And when we say received, these are students and your colleagues recognizing your work.
Marisella Rodriguez:
You know, just to convey to listeners, SanSan did not put her own hat in this in this race. And, you know, it was demonstrating all these things. Students and colleagues recognized you, which to me just makes it all the more meaningful. But I'll I'll let you share a bit.
SanSan Kwan:
Thank you so much. I would be blushing if you could see me under my mask. So the class that I teach, the American Cultures class I teach, is called Theater 52AC: Dance in American Cultures and the aim of the class. I always tell my students at the outset, and then I repeat it continuously over the course of the semester is that if nothing, what I want the main takeaway to be for them at the end of the class is to recognize the ways in which dance as a practice is something that not only reflects but also has the ability to shape how we understand our social world.
SanSan Kwan:
So that's what the class is. And we look at a variety of different dance forms, from concert dance to commercial and popular dance, and also to social dance. And, you know, true to the American Cultures’ objectives, we look across a variety of racial and ethnic groups in the ways that they practice.
Marisella Rodriguez:
How do students receive this experience? And that's such a broad question that I'm asking. But, you know, what are these indicators in the classroom or things that students may be sharing with you that just indicates to you that they're following along in all the ways and the things that you're trying to teach them?
SanSan Kwan:
Yeah, the feedback I usually get is, number one, Wow. I never realized you could think about dance that way. People don't tend to think of dance as something that's a meaning-making endeavor. They don't think of it really as something that can help to shape culture. So that's the first response I usually get. And the second one is how much they love the actual dancing.
SanSan Kwan:
When we dance in class and all the video viewing that we do in addition to, of course, the readings and writing.
Victoria Robinson:
Yeah, that makes me think about a lot of people won't identify themselves as a dancer or a performer, but part of what students are really recognizing in their nomination of you was the ability to bring them into the idea of being a dancer, a performer. If not physically, the attachment of playfulness and joyfulness and that really deep emotion that you seem to bring to the classroom.
Victoria Robinson:
How do you do that? And that's that's that's that magic.
SanSan Kwan:
Well, I think that as I said in a class the other day, I mean, there's just no denying the kind of kinesthetic joy that we get from even just watching bodies in motion. So we do a lot of video viewing and there is just that kinesthetic connection that we get just watching bodies in motion rhythmically or to music.
SanSan Kwan:
So that's one way. And then with regard to your your comment about dance, people not necessarily thinking of themselves as dancers. I do, and, I always wonder whether it's corny or not, but I, often at the beginning of the semester have students read this humor piece from the New Yorker called I, a Dancer. And it's this silly little piece where this gentleman sort of goes through the various kinds of milestones in his life and talks about how much dance are a part of them.
SanSan Kwan:
But in a humor, you know, in a humorous way. And so I have students read that, and then I have them write to the ways in which they think of themselves as dance.
Victoria Robinson:
I love the gravitas of the dancer.
Marisella Rodriguez:
What are some of the things that students share with you in that assignment and how they see themselves as a dancer?
SanSan Kwan:
So some students will pick up on that and riff on that. But the point is just to get them to understand that all of us are dancers.
Victoria Robinson:
So one of the opportunities for the class that you teach is to make the connections between our public and our private lives. Some of us dance for ourselves in our living rooms, right when nobody is watching. And then part of our public life is actually performing with others and with people. And I think about those connections today with the kind of political moments that we're in and you are also being recognized by students for the fact that there is a confidence that gets built for being with others and being able to relate to each other.
Victoria Robinson:
And I'm wondering if you could speak to the particular skills that come with being part of a performance study section of life, of disciplinary life, of emotional life, and why are student's making those connections to these bigger political moments.
SanSan Kwan:
Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. I mean, one of the things that we do in my department or we try to emphasize in it in my department as the so-called transferable skill for students who take classes in theater, dance, and performance studies, is that theater and dance and performance are all necessarily collaborative practices. So they really train us all in how to work with one another.
SanSan Kwan:
Sometimes in tension with one another, sometimes in contradiction with one another. All of us bringing our separate bodily experiences and relationships and histories to what we do and, you know, having to come into a space together and work those out and create something in collaboration.
Marisella Rodriguez:
What was that like during the pandemic, during online teaching?
SanSan Kwan:
Right. So glad you asked. As you know, Michaela, those of us who teach dance technique in the department applied for and were very lucky to receive a Center for Teaching and Learning teaching grant. To think about this very question of how do you teach dance remotely? And it was a really great opportunity last year to me as a group of dance faculty and then with the other faculty members across campus who had gotten that award to think about how we continue to convey the values of dance remotely.
SanSan Kwan:
And I would say that in the end, it was a really gratifying experience because, you know, of course, there were sacrifices we had to make and things that we couldn't do, having to teach dance classes online. But I think we also learned that there were some maybe some takeaways, and I can name what I think some of those takeaways were in teaching across Zoom. And that was, I think we had to work harder to think about how to connect with our students and how our students might connect with each other.
SanSan Kwan:
And we had to get more creative about that. But I think we also really had to think about the class as and this is a good takeaway for the future, but to think about our dance technique classes, not so much about honing people's technical skills in pointing their toes or turning out or straightening their legs, but really reminding students of the somatic and therapeutic value of just being in our bodies.
SanSan Kwan:
And so we just all shifted in our dance technique classes to thinking about like, I'm just going to make this class an opportunity for students to take a breath, lay down, come back into their bodies, express themselves physically, to move out of their desks, away from their desks, out of their chairs. So that was what the classes became about.
SanSan Kwan:
And I'm glad they offered that for students and for us as faculty members. And I think that's, again, something that we’ll continue to foster in our technique classes.
Victoria Robinson:
That's an incredible gift to be able to take a radical pause and to be reminded, to breathe and be in your body and take care of yourself. I hadn't thought about that as a way that the tone and the shape might shift away from so-called technical command of skills. Are there any other significant ways that you think the moment that we're in has also challenged, changed, provided opportunities for your teaching to do different things, or be shaped in a different way?
Victoria Robinson:
And of course, I'm thinking particularly about the past two years of what is being named as a racial reckoning and the conversations around race, which of course are so specific to the idea of the American Cultures’ classroom very much based around the idea of a comparative of analysis of race and ethnicity in particular.
SanSan Kwan:
Yeah, I mean, of course, I think that this moment underscores really prominently how important the American Cultures requirement and the American Cultures’ classes are for students. Everybody needs to take a moment, a semester, and think about how deeply a definition and an understanding of the Americas is inflected and built around ideas about race. So in the American Cultures program is really important.
SanSan Kwan:
And then with regard to thinking about these last two years with, you know, both the pandemic and Zoom school is how much the chat function was really, really robust and how much students really appreciated the opportunity to have another format to actively engage with course material. Because in the classroom they usually just sit silently while others are speaking.
SanSan Kwan:
But with the chat function, I mean, there could just be these multi-vocal, super active conversations and even just moments for students to encourage one another and support one another via the chat function. And so I sort of miss that. And for about half a second I considered trying to organize some kind of Discord chat that I could throw up on the screen so that would operate like the chat function.
SanSan Kwan:
But I let go of that because I think that the ability for like distraction and me to have to multitask between the screen and the people talking and the material I wanted to deliver might be too much. But, but that was something that was really fabulous. And then the other thing about the last two years that I'll share is that I slashed my curriculum when we moved to Zoom school and I didn't bring it back this year.
SanSan Kwan:
And I think it's okay. I think that it was, again, a reminder that students need moments to really find balance in their lives and moments to sit more deeply with material rather than racing through a whole bunch of content. So to me, that felt like it was an okay loss.
Marisella Rodriguez:
I would imagine that a lot of instructors are thinking, That resonates with me. In my day-to-day job of just chatting with instructors about teaching and learning. I've heard many of these things and there's this tension of, but I don't want to cut these things. It's so important when you're in the field to know these things. And absolutely that is very much true.
Marisella Rodriguez:
But there's also this boundary that we're in and that there's only so many days in a course, so many lecture sessions, so many discussion sections. And if we really want students to learn these things meaningfully, we need to have that conversation about death over breadth And when those come into play.
Victoria Robinson:
And also as instructors, I think we just get used to adding and adding and adding and we don't want to take and take and take.
Marisella Rodriguez:
And you lose track.
Victoria Robinson:
And you absolutely do. And before you know it, it's like a geological system in the class. SanSan again, you're being recognized because of this very difficult balance, I think especially in the classroom, such as an American Cultures’ classroom, where there's a political imperative, people are in the space together who may never have taken a course in theater, dance and performance studies, and they may be from sociology and public health and engineering.
Victoria Robinson:
And yet somehow you bring people together. And it does seem as if it's because you enjoy teaching. You know, people would say how much it seemed like you wanted to be there and you were dying for the conversation. And I'm wondering what drives that joy that you have to be in the classroom.
SanSan Kwan:
Wow. What drives the joy? Well, the students, of course, actually. Yeah. That's an easy, easy answer. I just so appreciate the lively dialog and the insights that students bring. When I first was assigned for this class, we are moving it from a class that's normally, you know, 40 to 60 students to a large lecture course of 120. And I remember being in a panic and I went and talked to Richard Freishtat at the Center for Teaching and Learning.
SanSan Kwan:
And I said, I, you know, don't know how to lecture. I always teach student-centered classes. I don't know how to teach 120 students. And he offered me so much relief by just saying, you can still use all of those same student-centered strategies in 120-student class. You don't have to all of a sudden lecture for 50 minutes.
SanSan Kwan:
And so that just really liberated me. And so the classroom part of what makes it so enjoyable for me is that it's a lively, multi-vocal dialog instead of just me talking at the students.
Marisella Rodriguez:
How do you nurture those conversations? You've used the term multi-vocality a couple of times, and that is something that Victoria and I have been thinking about a lot and in the teaching context, but actually putting that into practice and making sure that the space is equitable and inclusive, that's a non-trivial task. So what advice might you give to faculty trying to do that same thing and what have you done in the past?
Victoria Robinson:
Absolutely. I think somebody said when I was reading the evaluations that it seems as if Professor Kwan sees me as her future colleague and in that, I read such respect. And maybe that's also part of why students feel that they want to show up and be in conversation. So again, thank you for that, for how you construct the classroom.
SanSan Kwan:
Thanks. I want to credit my early pedagogical training to actually New York University, the expository writing program where I learned a lot of skills in teaching. And one of the skills I learned is that you can't just walk into a classroom after having assigned, you know, a 20-page dense, scholarly reading and say, So what did everyone think?
SanSan Kwan:
You have to give targeted, specific work for students to do before they can tell you what they think. So I usually start with some kind of free writing to a prompt so that students have a minute to bring their minds back into the reading and to synthesize their thinking through writing, and also obviously to give students who may not want to talk aloud in 120 student class to still engage with the material.
SanSan Kwan:
So we usually start that way, and then they work in small groups so that they can share, you know, in a lower-stakes environment. And then I invite students to speak. It's part of the larger classroom. And as Richard Freishtat always had led me to anticipate, more students speak in a 120-student classroom than I think they're going to. So again, I'm always really gratified by how lively and robust the dialog is and how many people really are willing to speak. But I think it really does help to set them up to speak by having them write and speak in a smaller environment before they talk out to the large group.
Victoria Robinson:
Yeah, I think also I'm so appreciative of that as an intervention, an assignment structure because we could have been dropping our kids off at school. We may be running from another class. We may have had a phone call with somebody that was difficult, things are on our mind. And to me, when developing that equitable learning environment it’s recognizing those multitudes of how we come into any one thing. And it felt that that pause again that you provide of let's all reset and have the opportunity, that feels like such a takeaway to share with other people. It’s wonderful.
SanSan Kwan:
Yeah. And I should add, as the dancer and dance studies scholar that I am, that for me in that class, especially because it's about dance, I do also really think it's important to give students an embodied experience of the material that we're looking at. So I do sometimes start class with a little dancing or a little meditation, something that reminds students of their bodies.
Victoria Robinson:
Do you have a favorite dance?
SanSan Kwan:
I mean, what we've been doing this semester is I just get everyone up on their feet and we choose a piece of music and we do a mirroring or a flocking exercise as those of us in the dance world call it, where I'll start out and I'll just start moving and they'll follow me and then we pass it on to someone else and follow that person, and then we pass it on to someone else and follow that person. And students have gotten to the point where they're more comfortable with it.
Victoria Robinson:
Love, it sounds like old body popping.
Marisella Rodriguez:
I can envision how this would be useful in even courses that are outside of theater, dance, and performance studies. You know, what are these some of these strategies that you use in your course that you would say this is interdisciplinary, this is a great way to bring the community together?
SanSan Kwan:
I mean, yeah, all of the strategies I talked about in terms of writing as thinking, as speaking in small groups and then sharing more, more out loud, and then yeah, I mean, I'm all for embody techniques in any classroom, you know, fifty minutes or an hour and twenty minutes is a long time to sit. So to get people up out of their seats and moving their bodies is always useful. But this is also about equity. To get back to what Victoria has been suggesting, it's important to also have a diversity of different ways into the course material. So that's both at the level of teaching strategies like, you know, think, pair share and embodied learning and so forth. But also with the course material, I try to offer a diversity of formats for engagement.
SanSan Kwan:
So, you know, there's a lot of reading, but there's also a lot of viewing and some dance assignments where they have to go out and dance and recorded or do it live for the class. In pre-COVID times, I asked students to go out and watch live performance. I bring in guest artists that perform for them in class, and then every year I'm so fortunate to be able to invite the illustrious Latanya Tigner from our department who comes and actually what we did this year I reserved the West Crescent Lawn down there across from BAMPFA and got some amplification, and Latanya taught a dance class.
SanSan Kwan:
Latanya, if you don't know much about her work, has so much experience in the Africanist legacy in social dance and popular dance and actually all dance forms. But she has done a lot of research over many years, thinking about the ways in which Africanist aesthetics are held in the body and the way that those aesthetics get passed down. And we can find them from the Charleston to the Shoot to the Moonwalk, etc. So she taught a great class for the students doing that. So yeah, like a diversity of formats for engaging with course material, that's important in my class.
Victoria Robinson:
I'm feeling left out because I wish I'd seen that on the West Crescent Lawn. It also speaks to, I think, what you were very mindful to do during the COVID time, which was public engagement, is the possibility of being in a new space with students with different elements of community around you. Was that a deliberate intent? I mean, putting it on the West Crescent Lawn and all of a sudden the audience is not predictable.
SanSan Kwan:
It's always great to dance in public. I think it's always so exciting to see the ways in which passers-by engage. It wasn't necessarily deliberate, you know. I mean, I'm in a, you know, lecture hall with the traditional format of the, you know, the stage and the screen and then the raked seats for the students. So it's not a good environment for dancing in.
SanSan Kwan:
And, you know, with COVID, too, it wasn't appropriate to have everyone, you know, breathing heavily in that classroom next to one another. So we did it outside, out on the lawn. And it was fun. But, yes, there's always that really exciting electric energy when you dance outside and there are passers-by who get to benefit from that energy.
Marisella Rodriguez:
Well, I'm looking at our time left that we have with SanSan here and I would just would love to throw you the last question. You know, what, is there anything else that we haven't shared that you really want to share yet or anything you'd like to just end on?
SanSan Kwan:
Everybody's a dancer. Yeah.
Victoria Robinson:
Yes, that's me in the kitchen tonight.
Marisella Rodriguez:
There you go.
Victoria Robinson:
Thank you so much. This was a joy to be in conversation with you. And I'm sure so many people across the campus and beyond are going to be excited to hear you talk about this incredible course that you're getting, getting recognized for, but also the innovations that straddle your own department and discipline. Thank you.
SanSan Kwan:
Cool. Thank you. Thanks for the opportunity.
Marisella Rodriguez:
Well, thank you for being in conversation with us. We'd also like to thank the Ethnic Studies Changemaker team, which includes Pablo Gonzalez, Rania Salem, Angel Garcia Ballesteros, the American Culture Center, and the Center for Teaching and Learning. You can find all of our episodes on the AC and CTL websites and Spotify.