Undergrad Research: "Our TEKS," a Theatrical Production and AMS Senior Thesis
Today we share with you news about an upcoming theatrical production, "Our TEKS," written by and directed by American Studies graduating senior Kelli Schultz.
As Kelli describes,
“Our TEKS” is a theatrical exploration of my American Studies/Plan II senior thesis. Over the past year, I have followed the Texas textbook controversy by conducting dozens of interviews with educators, government officials and textbook publishers. These interviews, along with transcripts of Board meetings and media coverage, were combined into a play, which explores the 2010 Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS). It’s Our Town meets Barnum & Bailey meets The Colbert Report.
And, in a bit more depth, here's the official abstract for the project:
In 2010, the Texas State Board of Education drafted a list of over 100 amendments to the social studies curriculum, which explicitly defined what teachers must include in their K-12 classrooms. Some of the changes include replacing the term democracy with constitutional republic, emphasizing the religious foundations of our country and removing “Hip Hop” as a cultural art form. While the media charged the board with rewriting history, others would commend the elected officials for correcting an already liberal bias in the educational system. Utilizing a documentary-based style of devised theatre, we will explore the straight facts, pure fiction and implications surrounding the 2010 Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS).
We were lucky enough to learn about the project from Kelli last week at the Undergraduate Honors Symposium (side note: expect a write-up and photographs from that wonderful event soon!) and, we must say, we're very excited to see the production. If you have an interest in education, Texas, American history, theater, or the intersections between politics and artistic representation, you best not miss it.The production will run two nights, April 30 and May 1, at WIN 2.180. Both shows begin at 8pm. More nitty-gritty details can be found here.We are also told there will be cookies and balloon animals, so... there's also that.
Undergrad Research: American Studies Honors Symposium Thursday, 4/19
Today, we continue our recent trend of featuring undergraduate excellence by sharing with you more details about the American Studies Honors Symposium this Thursday, April 19, from 5 - 7pm in Burdine 436A:
This symposium will showcase the remarkable research of our undergraduate honors thesis writers in the Department of American Studies. Part One--consisting of three papers--will explore diverse topics related to Texas and its borderlands, including research on hydraulic fracturing; state educational standards in the social studies curriculum; and an analysis of the drug war in Mexico and local efforts to resist violence with art and social activism. Part Two--comprised of three papers--will examine various modes of creative expression, ranging from rock-and-roll and its unlikely alliance of Patti Smith, Allen Ginsberg, and Walt Whitman; boy choir schools and coming of age narratives in American culture; and sport, Jack Kerouac and the creative process. Each presentation will be approximately ten to fifteen minutes in length. After each panel, there will be a discussion with the audience. There will be a short break between panels, as well as a reception after the panels are completed.
Kelli Schultz, "Our TEKS: A Theatrical Exploration of the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills through Thornton Wilder's Our Town"Julie Reitzi, "Making Due and Making Change: Women and Youth of Ciudad Juarez Respond to the Drug War"David Juarez, "Beating the Score: Jack Kerouac and the Sometimes Fantastical World of Baseball"Miriam Anderson, "Just the Fracks: Hydraulic Fracturing in a Culture of Contradicting Proof"Laci Thompson, "Always On a Tightrope: The Power of Contradiction and the Beauty of Rock Music as Seen Through the Work of Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg and Patti Smith"Alexandria Chambers, "Rob(b)ed Boys: Employing Fiction to Introduce the Choirboy School Upbringing into the American Coming-of-Age Discourse"
We hope to see you there!
Announcement: Interview with Kelli Schultz, AMS Senior and Dean's Distinguished Graduate
What was/is your favorite class in American Studies?I loved Prof. Ware’s AMS 310: Intro to American Studies course. I have taken a lot of specialized AMS 370 courses which I loved but I’m intrigued by how each professor teaches the whole story of American History in one semester. Her underlying mission, it seemed, was to tell the untold accounts of US History, the ones you weren’t told in high school. We learned about the Carlisle Indian School, Japanese Internment and Coney Island. This was the first class I took in the Department and it sparked my interest in the pedagogy of social studies, which I ultimately ended up writing my honors thesis on. What are your research interests? Any particular interests you were able to pursue in American Studies or elsewhere (in class or in extracurricular activities)?I have always been extremely interested in the history of History. How do we talk about our identity as Americans during different periods of time and who we associate ourselves with? Which stories do we leave out? Who do we choose to include? How do we tell their story? My honors thesis is called “Our TEKS” and is a theatrical exploration of the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills through Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. It is a devised theatre piece about the controversial 2010 standards chosen by the Texas State Board of Education which was covered by the media internationally. Over the past year, I have watched hours of footage from Board meetings, followed the media’s response and interviewed educators and textbook publishers who are affected by these standards. My play incorporates all of this research in a documentary-style live performance on April 30 and May 1 in WIN 2.180 on the UT campus.Did your work inform or influence your post-graduate plans?My work absolutely informed my post-graduate plans. Next year, I will be venturing out to San Francisco, CA to join the 2012 Teach for America corps where I will be teaching English to high school students. Over the past year, I have learned innovative ways to talk about tough issues such as race, class and identity in the classroom. There is some extremely exciting research taking place using Theatre in Education techniques which help improve classroom participation and performance. Though I will not be applying these to Texas education standards (which my thesis covers), I will undoubtedly incorporate them into my teaching for the next two years.Why did you ultimately decide to study American Studies?I came into UT with two majors: Plan II and Theatre and Dance. I started my freshman year with a lot of credits from high school and had plans to graduate early. However, I had tested out of my US History credit and, when I was making my schedule for the first two semesters, I found that I really missed learning about American history. I took Professor Ware’s AMS 310: Intro to American Studies course and fell in love with the major, particularly because we focused less on dates and battles in history and were asked to look at currents of culture. We studied music, art, politics, philosophy and the changing thoughts of the country. In this way, we saw how these people lived at a particular moment in time and this method really spoke to me. I have never once regretted my decision to pick up this third major and am so thankful to Val for helping me find a way to complete it in 4 years!Kelli Schultz will be graduating this spring with a Bachelor of Arts in Plan II Honors, American Studies and Theatre and Dance. She chose the University of Texas as it allowed her to pursue all of her interests in just four years. Her Honors thesis is a performative analysis of the 2010 Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills. These state-wide standards sparked international controversy two years ago when the Texas State Board of Education was accused of rewriting US History with a conservative bias. Over the past year, Kelli has conducted interviews with educators and governmentofficials and poured over hours of footage from Board meetings and public testimony. These transcripts, along with media coverage, will be incorporated into a documentary-based theatre piece to be performed in May 2012.Over the past four years, Kelli has received substantial scholarships from both the College of Liberal Arts and the College of Fine Arts. She has been involved in numerous productions with the Department of Theatre and Dance including The Trojan Women, The Threepenny Opera, Br’er Wood and 360 (round dance). She has also starred in numerous shows in Austin including the original cast of A. John Boulanger’s House of Several Stories (now published in Samuel French) and ZACH Theater’s recent production of Next to Normal. When she isn’t in class or rehearsing for a production, Kelli serves as a student ambassador and tour guide for the University of Texas Visitors Center. Upon graduation, she will join the 2012 Teach for America corps in San Francisco, CA.Undergrad Research: A Trip to the Archives in NYC, Part 2
Note: this is the second of two installments about David's archival research trip. The first can be found here.
I landed at La Guardia, took a taxi to the apartment building on W 71st street, unloaded my bags, and finally sat down in New York City, contemplating everything I would see over the next few days. The Berg Collection wouldn’t open until Tuesday—it was Saturday when I flew in—so I had two full days of sight-seeing available to me and I took advantage of it. I visited Times Square, the Empire State Building, Liberty Island, Ellis Island, NYU campus and Washington Square Park, Radio City Music Hall, Rockefeller Center, Grand Central Station, the site of the World Trade center, The Strand, and up, down, and around Central Park on a tour-bus. By mid-week, I was used to catching the subway and disembarking near Bryant Park, a brief walk away from the ice skating rink and, most importantly, the Stephen A. Schwarzmann building, the iconic section of the New York Public Library. After two full days of exploring Manhattan from top to bottom, I was ready to begin the research that brought me to New York in the first place.There is always a difference between what we expect to happen and what actually happens. I expected the Berg reading room to be an unsettlingly quiet room, observed by predatory librarians making sure that the timid, silent researchers at the tables didn’t destroy the priceless artifacts in their hands. But in reality, the room’s acoustics reminded me of the sixth floor of the PCL where occasional conversations and the jostle of books and pencils on the desks aren’t followed by an agitated, “Shh!” It was also staffed with helpful, caring, and most importantly, smiling, librarians ready to assist me however they could.The Kerouac archives are, at first glance, daunting: they consist of 90 boxes of materials, as well as several oversized materials. The sports materials—real and fantastical—reside in 4 of those boxes. I figured I could finish a box a day, even having enough time to eat lunch and take an extended trip around Manhattan. What I didn’t expect was that I’d only make it through box 59—the first box that contains Kerouac’s sports diaries of 1936 and 1938, as well as his horse-racing newspapers and personal baseball statistics and analyses of his Pawtucketville teams—after two and a half days of work. When I started to read his sports diaries I became absorbed in his day-to-day accounts of sports events across the nation, including the wins and losses of baseball teams and horse races, as well as his detailed predictions for future events. He was dedicated to reporting the outcome of every game or race he encountered.Boxes 60-62, which contain the fantasy baseball materials, weren’t as time-consuming as 59. I had plenty of time to examine the contents, including fantasy baseball newspapers, cards, statistics, letters, and diagrams for how to play the game. If you can imagine a 14 to 16-year-old Kerouac, sitting in his bedroom, developing his own sports newspapers and stories, some in pencil and others on a typewriter, you also have to imagine a much older Kerouac—in college, on the road, and eventually bloated and worn-down by excessive drinking in the early 60s—keeping a systematic record of his fantasy baseball league, teams, and players, some with fleshed-out backstories.Whatever I thought sports meant to Kerouac before this trip was an underestimation. He lived and breathed sports. Before he ever had dreams of becoming a novelist, Kerouac had dreams of becoming a star athlete and a journalist. What appears to be an amusing anecdote about a football scholarship to Columbia University becomes the realization of a young Kerouac wanting to excel on the field and become a sensation. Before becoming part of the nomadic Beat gang of writers and artists in the 1940s and 1950s, Kerouac was part of the Lowell gang in the 1930s, playing baseball, running track behind the textile mills, jotting down the statistics of his friends’ batting averages, hits, and runs in a steno notebook.It was thrilling to sit there amongst all of these materials and realize that I loved every minute of it. While looking at his sports diaries, I had to remind myself a few times that this was it. I wasn’t reading about these diaries; I was reading these diaries.My subway ride back to the apartment gave me time to think about the future and what all of this meant to me beyond the thesis. Not only had I collected materials that would enrich my thesis, I had also gotten a brief taste of scholarly research. I wanted even more meals in the future.The future still looks cloudy to me past the month of May when I graduate. I still don’t know which graduate school I will attend, or if I will be attending graduate school at all. My future has never felt so uncertain. But knowing how accomplished I felt after returning home to Austin after this trip, and knowing how much fun I had working with these primary sources and one-of-a-kind artifacts, I know that I can do this for the rest of my life without regret. I learned that I love research, and I believe research is quite fond of me, too.