Open Stages
A Compendium of Open Sources for Theater Educators & Practitioners
Courseware
Beyond textbooks... teachers around the globe are sharing their theater course syllabi and assignments for other teachers and students to use and reuse.
According to the Open Education Consortium, "OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a free and open digital publication of high quality college and university‐level educational materials. These materials are organized as courses, and often include course planning materials and evaluation tools as well as thematic content."
We jump-start this section with a selection of theater-related courses from MIT OpenCourseWare. The materials shared for each class include syllabus, calendar, readings, and assignments. These online classes are made available through a CC-BY-NC-SA license. The Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license or “BY-NC-SA” allows you to use and adapt the work for noncommercial purposes only, and only as long as you give credit to the creator/s and make any adaptations you share with others available under the same or a compatible license.
Selection from Theater Courses offered by MIT OpenCourseWare
1 / Modern Drama
This undergrad course was designed by MIT faculty member Diana Henderson, a dramaturg and expert on Shakespeare and digital pedagogies. The course reading list includes usual suspects from the 20th-century North Atlantic white male canon but makes welcome room for Soyinka, Hwang, Deverare Smith, and Churchill.
This course was designed by Thomas DeFrantz, an MIT faculty member who combines his academic work with tap dance practice. The course examines contemporary American theatrical practice through the work of female playwrights and other under-represented gender and cultural groups.
3 / Playwriting I
This course is an introduction to playwriting designed by Laura Harrington. The reading list is biased towards traditional North Atlantic plotting structure. The mentor texts lean almost exclusively toward white male writers with a taste for literal representation and the proverbial beginning, middle, and end.