Taking center stage
Theatre professor chosen for national teaching award

by Sue Richardson
Publications and Alumni Communication

Ask Suzanne Burgoyne what she teaches, and she will tell you it is students. They, more than the subject matter, are the center of what she does at Mizzou. "I view students as colleagues and collaborators in the ongoing quest for knowledge, understanding and artistic growth," says Burgoyne, professor of directing in the Theatre department.

Her stance is one of the reasons Burgoyne was chosen 2003 outstanding teacher of theater in higher education by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. A former student's nomination got the ball rolling, and it was joined by more than 30 supporting letters from current and former students and colleagues worldwide.

In some ways, the saying "what goes around, comes around" can be applied to Burgoyne's win. Last year she nominated a former undergraduate mentor for theater association's career achievement in higher education award, and he won.

"I was able to present the award to him," she says. "This was someone I had not seen for many years and who I don't think fully realized how important his mentoring and encouragement had been to me as an undergraduate. He was the one who led me to decide to go to graduate school in theater, and the one who put me in contact with a professional theater school in Belgium where I got a Fulbright to study right out of
undergraduate school.

"I was thrilled that I was able to help him get the recognition that I wanted him to have, because he had been so important in my life. And then to have it turn around this year and someone nominate me for a similar award is very meaningful."

Beyond gaining national recognition, Burgoyne says the award affirms her teaching goals. "I am working with young artists in terms of their development as creative and scholarly thinkers. There is this wonderful sense that I am doing a good job and that I am doing what I want to do as a teacher. That is important to me."

At MU since 1989, Burgoyne teaches beginning and advanced directing and script analysis, and graduate seminars in the history and theory of directing. In the classroom she stresses that there is no one right answer, and that she does not expect or want a classroom of cloned Burgoynes.

"Each student has different gifts and a different path to follow in life, as in art, and learning how to think in certain ways about a creative project gives the students freedom to believe in their own creative process and, thus, produce wonderful artistic discoveries," she says.

Doing theater allows one to learn more about one's self and the world, Burgoyne says, and she has created a course that supports this premise in a nontraditional way.

Her Theatre of the Oppressed class introduces a theatrical technique new to the community. Burgoyne was selected as a 2000/2001 Carnegie Scholar, a program that fosters the scholarship of teaching and learning. With four MU faculty from other disciplines, she studied the impact of the class on students' understanding of oppression.

Through audience participation, Theatre of the Oppressed looks at issues of power and oppression, and helps individuals and groups of people explore their own problems, such as violence, harassment and homophobia, and then search for solutions to the problems. "Looking at relationships between the individual experience and the larger social picture is part of what this kind of theater does," she says.

Students say that as a director, Burgoyne is a caring professor who puts her actors first. She challenges actors to go beyond the superficial level and uses debriefing exercises to ensure that they are all right.

The debriefing sessions are one of the experimental techniques she brings to the department. A representative from MU's Counseling Center leads weekly discussions with the actors who talk candidly about how performing their characters influences their lives.

"I think debriefing is helpful for us," Burgoyne says. "Traditional theater doesn't take into account the negative or positive impact that doing theater has on the actors. Traumatic material can affect people in many ways. The theater profession tends to ignore it or leave it up to the individual to deal with it.

"If we are going to be responsible teachers, we should help our students be aware that acting can have personal consequences and help them deal with it."

This story originally appeared in the June 26, 2003 edition of Mizzou Weekly.

Additional links:

Suzanne Burgoyne (scroll down)
Theatre Department

Association for Theatre in Higher Education
Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

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