Undergrad Research Undergrad Research

Undergrad Research: Review of AMS Senior Kelli Schultz's Play, "Our TEKS"

Texas Capitol.Last Monday night, senior Kelli Schultz premiered her American Studies/Plan II honors thesis play titled, “Our TEKS,” to an eager and curious audience. The play was the culmination of a year’s worth of diligent and passionate research into the Texas textbook controversies in 2010 when the Texas State Board of Education drafted a list of over 100 amendments to the Social Studies curriculum for the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS). Taking a critical and creative look into the historical hoopla and media coverage of the new standards, Kelli referred to her play as “Our Town meets Barnum & Bailey meets The Colbert Report.” As a form of documentary theater, it combined true accounts and reenactments from board room transcripts, interviews, video and audio clips, and even a surreal recreation of a Colbert Report segment with Alexandra Reynolds as the ever-vigilant Stephen Colbert.Kelli began by providing a brief overview of what this is all about—policy, history, and memory—before introducing us to the 15 elected “experts” on the Texas State Board of Education. Each member was represented as a circus performer in silhouette, dazzling and dismaying the audience with their rhetoric and apparent expertise in the matters of K-12 standards for education in the departments of Language Arts, Science, Math, and Social Studies. There was the “strong man” Bob Craig; Barbara Cargill, unfurling a long cloth from her mouth as she spoke to the crowd; skilled-balancer Pat Hardy; Siamese twins, a cannon-ball man, a mime, a few clowns, and more. It was an ingenious way to represent the so-called “experts” administering these standards, only one of whom actually holds a degree in history and has experience teaching this information in the classroom. Two are ministers, four are professors, one is a dentist, and another holds no college degree at all.From there, the play skillfully reinterpreted the influences that the Board has on Social Studies standards, not only in classrooms but in local and national textbooks as well. House Bill 2923, which adheres strongly to the U.S. Constitution’s Tenth Amendment, prohibits the use of the national standards over those of the state standards in Texas. Schools and educators either must acquiesce to the Board’s demands or face harsh consequences for not implementing the new changes in the classroom. In the play, the Board met to discuss their proposed changes, all the while blowing up balloon animals, blowing bubbles, playing with toys, and hopping sporadically from chair to chair in the board room, creating a dizzying effect for the observers.What was so fascinating is how deftly the play shifted tones from one scene to the next, bringing in laughs at one moment and silent, thoughtful reflection in another. One segment featured an interactive “historical celebrity” game, turning the spotlight onto the nervous and anxious audience, testing their knowledge of the 61 people deemed the “most important” in the social studies standards. Drawing a slip of paper with one these names on them from a cup, audience members had to provide the rest of the audience with enough clues to guess who it was, or, failing to do so, write the name on a chalkboard and stand in silent shame for 10 seconds in front of your peers. The audience laughed and cringed as names like William Jennings Bryan, Thurgood Marshall, and Dolores Huerta were added to the board of “forgotten” names.Another scene featured a “five minute history of hip hop,” an important part of American culture that was removed from the current social studies standards. Chrissy Shackelford and Maki Borden rapped a list of prominent hip hop artists, including Afrika Bambaataa, Grand Master Flash, Tupac, Biggie, Snoop Dogg, Kanye West, and Jay-Z. It was both a great way to pay homage to late twentieth and early twenty-first century artists as well as “eulogize the death of hip hop” in the Texas standards.For me, the most moving parts of the play were the three monologues by Salvadorian archbishop Oscar Romero, performed by Ben Bazan. Romero entered the play without fanfare or any direct acknowledgement of who he was, signifying the loss of his name and relevance to twentieth-century history due to the effects of these new standards. Kelli provided a nice twist on Thornton Wilder’s Our Town as Romero demanded to know how he wound up in the graveyard of forgotten people, watched the Board meeting in which he is taken out of the standards, and dissolved into the numbing calm of absence in history. It was a poignant example of how these standards strive to create an adequate list of important people in our history while leaving dozens behind due to a lack of time or relevance on the STAR test (previously known as the TAKS).As Kelli said after the show, we have to ask ourselves, “What if you were forgotten?” when facing the subjective subject of history and the political rhetoric of elected officials in determining who stays and who goes. The play stands as a symbol of the inadequacies and inefficiencies with the current system and standards, and begs the important question on everyone’s mind, “So, what do we do now?” History rests in our hands.

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Undergrad Research Holly Genovese Undergrad Research Holly Genovese

Undergrad Research: Overview of Undergraduate Honors Symposium

Last week, the Department of American Studies had the pleasure of featuring the work of six exceptional undergraduates at the first annual Undergraduate Honors Symposium. The students presented their thesis projects, with topics ranging from resource extraction policy to the American coming-of-age narrative. These projects take the form of thesis papers as well as websites, documentary theater pieces, and novellas.The evening began with a presentation by Miriam Anderson on hydraulic fracturing. Miriam offered a charming and funny visual presentation on the natural gas industry and its detractors set to the words of Dr. Seuss' The Lorax.  Miriam also shared her website, which explains the economic and environmental impacts of the fracking process from multiple perspectives. Miriam was followed by Julie Reitzi, who discussed the drug war in Ciudad Juarez, focusing on the involvement and responses of women and youth. Julie's presentation provided perspective on a much talked about issue, and she shared striking images of women and youth who are both implicated in and responding to the violence and poverty in the city, including Las Guerreras, a group of women on pink motorcycles who distribute food and other supplies to impoverished neighborhoods. Rounding out the first half of the night was Kelli Schultz, who described her ambitious documentary theater project, "Our TEKS," which is a play based on the controversy surrounding recent changes to the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills by the Texas Board of Education. Kelli discussed her process and inspiration for creating the play, which draws on circus imagery and Thornton Wilder's Our Town. For more information on Kelli's production, check out our post last week, and head on over to the Winship building April 30 or May 1 at 8pm.The second half of the evening featured presentations by David Juarez, Alexandria Chambers, and Laci Thompson. David led off the second half with a description of his project on Jack Kerouac's early years of devising fantasy sports games, which David reads as early writing exercises for the budding Beat writer. David shared a number of images and score sheets from these whimsical and impressively detailed games, illustrating the way that the young Kerouac exercised control over a life that was often depicted as lacking it. Alex Chambers followed David's presentation with a discussion of American boy's choir schools, focusing on two in particular: the St. Thomas Choir School in New York City and the American Boy Choir School in Princeton, New Jersey. Alex's thesis project took the form of a novella that introduces the choirboy school upbringing into the American coming-of-age discourse, and she shared a wickedly funny selection from the beginning of her novella. The final speaker of the evening was Laci Thompson, whose eloquent presentation described the multiple representations of the night in Western thought and literature. Laci's thesis centers on the unique contributions of Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, and Patti Smith to this discourse of the night, and Laci ended her presentation with a strong call for academics to own their passions and to "have more fun," because that is what rock music like Patti Smith's is, first and foremost, all about.The evening of presentations was a fabulous success. It was wonderful to be able to chat with the presenters in group discussion and in one-on-one conversations afterward. I was particularly struck by the range of topics and formats represented by these thesis projects. One of the particular strengths of American Studies scholarship is the way it encourages both innovative themes and innovative forms, and both were on display at this event. It is clear that these senior AMS students are headed toward greater and greater things, and the Department should be proud to call them alumni.Stay tuned for more photographs from this event! And remember to follow us on Twitter for updates on new posts!

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Announcements, Undergrad Research Kate Grover Announcements, Undergrad Research Kate Grover

Announcement: Interview with Julie Reitzi, AMS Senior and Dean's Distinguished Graduate Honorable Mention

We're thrilled to share with you this interview with Dean's Distinguished Graduate Honorable Mention and American Studies senior Julie Reitzi. Here, she shares her experiences in American Studies over the past four years. Congratulations, Julie!What was, or is, your favorite class in American Studies?It’s so hard for me to pick. I found something great, useful, and perspective changing about every course that I took. This department has really great professors and lecturers.I think one of the classes that impacted me the most personally, though, was Professor Cordova’s Mexican American Cultural Studies. I came out of the class with a new way of thinking about myself. Both this class and Christina Garcia’s Ethnicity and Gender: La Chicana gave me an identity term that worked for me – Chicana. It embraces the complexity that can exist for people of Mexican descent living in the United States, and also has a political edge. I also came away with a deep sense of the importance of keeping ethnic studies programs alive. I was amazed at how much history I had never even heard about. Some of us were even angry that we had been denied that kind of education.As far as other influential classes, both Professor Lieu’s Asian Americans in Popular Culture and John Cline’s Global Power of the Funk really helped me grasp cultural studies theory and the importance of deconstructing popular culture. Professor Engelhardt’s Masculinity and Femininity intro course gave me a new way of thinking about gender roles – how they really are something we all participate in shaping. I never imagined a room full of sinister, robed men deciding how gender would operate in the United States, but it was good for me to complicate my understanding of patriarchy, to see it as something less top-down than my earlier conception was.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 a lot of those… Mexican American Studies; Women’s Studies and Feminism(s); Queer Theory; Racism, Race and Identity; Immigration and the Border; Popular Culture and Film; Social Justice Movements; Transformative Justice; Interpersonal Violence Prevention; Cultural Studies... The list could probably go on.I think my research and the extracurricular activities I’ve participated in reflect a lot of my academic interests. My honors thesis is about the impact of the drug war on the women and youth of Ciudad Juarez, a city that has been hard hit by economic downturn (as well as the ugly side of neoliberalism), a history of gendered violence, and an existing culture of impunity. It’s a very feminist project in that I focus on the agency of women and youth; whether they chose to participate in the drug economy or not isn’t something I really pass much judgment on. My goal is to look at the difficult choices they’re making in a really difficult environment. I also do some creative writing – short pieces about individual women that are intended to shift the attention to the experiences of individuals in a discourse of body counts. In a more abstract piece, I look at the city as a feminized body, imagining Ciudad Juarez as La Llorona herself– the weeping woman of borderlands lore who drowned her children for a man, but is ultimately rejected.This academic year, John Cline and I took the film series in the direction of “The ‘Other’ Americans,” an exploration of the relationship between the United States and the rest of the Western Hemisphere. People who know me probably weren’t too surprised by the theme, or the fact that I was the one to introduce to “From Dusk Til Dawn…”I also had the opportunity to develop my interest in interpersonal violence prevention by working with Voices Against Violence – an education and outreach program of the Counseling and Mental Health Center that focuses on dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking. There are some glimpses of my VAV background in my thesis – I draw some comparisons between activism in Ciudad Juarez to reclaim spaces to the project of Take Back the Night – an annual walk during Sexual Assault Awareness Month that encourages survivors to speak out and walk at night together without fear.Did your work inform or influence your post-graduate plans? How?They kind of went hand-in-hand, really. My boss offered me an internship the summer after my freshman year because she thought my interests in history and women’s studies, as well as my familiarity with statistics because of my psychology background, would be a really good fit at the company. They’re a Human Resources consulting firm, so it helps to have a solid, researched understanding of why certain groups are legally protected classes, why affirmative action legislation was put in place, why it’s still important to have anti-harassment trainings for workplaces, and so on. I sometimes get research assignments at work and have to stay current on legislation, so the practice I have from American Studies papers and my thesis is a pretty direct application.Why did you ultimately decide to study American Studies?Well, I had a lot of credit from high school coming in, so I gave myself the opportunity to try out a lot of different Liberal Arts areas. I had a really hard time picking something to focus on; I loved Women’s and Gender Studies, I found Sociology interesting, I loved the African American Studies class I took. I think I switched majors and minors about four times. I eventually learned about American Studies from a friend who was in the program, James Clark. He really found a way to make his interest in social justice work with the program, so that was a huge draw for me. I ended up taking a similar path; I’ve kind of brought my activism into my academic life and vice versa. To join in the oft-repeated refrain of this department, I also really loved being able to study just about anything and having the support of a small, close-knit department. Having Val as an academic advisor is immeasurably better than the experience I had with the stockade-style advising for undeclared students.Julie Reitzi is an American Studies Honors and Psychology major, minoring in Philosophy. She conducts interpersonal consent workshops and served as the 2010-2012 Voices Against Violence student organization president. She co-founded a feminist zine collective, and is committee chair of the 2011-2012 American Studies film series, “The ‘Other’ Americans.” She also serves on the Student Leadership Committee of the Gender and Sexuality Center. Her research interests include: feminisms, interpersonal violence prevention, border theory, race and racism in the United States, popular culture and film studies, social justice movements, and queer theory. After graduation she will work for a Human Resources Consulting firm in Houston, TX, where she has interned for three years.

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