Introduction

In April 2015, the Appalachian-based Roadside Theater and the NYC/Bronx-based Pregones Theater performed BETSY! off-Broadway in Manhattan at Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre (PRTT).¹ This musical about a South Bronx Puerto Rican performer discovering her Appalachian and Scots-Irish heritage was part of the 20+–year collaboration between the two companies. Though geographically and culturally different, Roadside and Pregones are both committed to creatively engaging the heritages and experiences of their audiences, and to generating intercultural dialogue between communities. Both companies develop work collaboratively, reaching out to their communities for inspiration and frequently workshopping productions with audience participation. They regard dialogue as a critical part of art-making and view their publics as resources and partners in the creative process.

Fittingly, the 2015 production of BETSY!, the third iteration of the play, created an additional layer of dialogue and audience participation. In fall 2014, Roadside and Pregones gathered a Scholars' Circle, an interdisciplinary group of approximately ten scholars, educators, and community organizers, in order to engage in pedagogical and academic work before, during, and beyond BETSY!'s rehearsal and production. Members had backgrounds in anthropology and folklore, theater and performance studies, composition and rhetoric, community organizing, and Latina/o and Latin American literature. Convened in association with the higher education consortium Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, the Circle was geographically and demographically diverse, including four senior scholars, two junior scholars, one graduate student, and three people working outside academia. Members participated in web-based conferences, wrote blog posts for HowlRound, attended in-person meetings and conferences, and, when possible, taught the play in their university courses and brought students and community members to see the performance.

The Circle sought to engage scholars in conversation with the artists and with one another, and to produce material for students and wider audiences.² Rather than merely including academics and students as end-receivers of the performance, the Circle engaged them as communities in dialogue. The expansion of dialogue and participation took place in classrooms, on the web (video, blogs, etc.), and in public discourse (e.g., publications). The project produced a nuanced consideration of students as audience members—observing their various points of entry into the work and the activities that engaged them most.

Expanding the dialogue and potential audience for BETSY! raised challenges that are the focus of this essay. As educators invested in engaged learning and as scholars devoted to collaborative research, we consider how scholarship and pedagogy can broaden the dialogue prompted through community-based arts. We also contemplate what we may have done differently in order to produce a more democratic, engaged, and dynamic dialogue with the many constituencies that this project hoped to reach. We observe how, in spite of the challenges, the Scholars' Circle provided a unique opportunity to further develop community and arts-engagement pedagogies, as well as to experience academic writing in a collaborative, dialogic mode.

Physical distance was a salient challenge, impacting the way we engaged (or not) in dialogue. Fewer than half the members of the Scholars' Circle lived or taught within a day's travel of New York City. Dialogue with the Circle consisted of a complicated web of online and in-person interactions, with different members participating in various teleconferences or in-person events, depending on their availability. We consider how the Circle could have benefited from a more in-depth consideration of what our geographical distances meant, how they impacted our work, and what internet technologies could and could not achieve. Each of us applied, for instance, our own engagement and teaching methodologies. Circle members did not determine together how we each could contribute to an engagement model from our specific locations, nor how we would facilitate deep participatory experiences for our students. Similarly, while most Circle members emphasized the need to generate online material that could be accessed by geographically disparate groups of students, we did not plan together how online media would supplement, replace, or work in concert with multidirectional, firsthand dialogue. Our focus, then, is on Scholars' Circle activities in relation to the values and methods in the wider field of community-based performance, particularly to its grounding principles of dialogue, collaboration, and relationship-building.

 

Of Terms and Methodologies

Both Roadside and Pregones, among other affiliations, are seen as community-based theaters. Some definitions of community-based theater are narrowly formulaic, such as Richard Owen Geer's "of, by, and for the people" (Geer 1993). According to this view, community-based theater is made, at least in part, by a community; out of or about its history, interests, or concerns; and for viewing by that same community. This definition, which limits interest to a particular social group, as well as the genre's widespread dismissal as amateur or consisting more of community organizing than art, has often produced a "silo" effect that the Scholars' Circle sought to overcome.

Critics such as Jan Cohen-Cruz and Arlene Goldbard, and ensemble theater companies such as Pregones and Roadside, have challenged those isolating notions of community-based art in general—and theater in particular—by offering an alternative understanding of this work as "a field in which artists, collaborating with people whose lives directly inform the subject matter, express collective meaning" (Cohen-Cruz 2005, 1). Cohen-Cruz describes the particular emergence of community-based performance in the mid-1970s as a genre inheriting the legacies of civil rights theater movements, with which it shares a "heightened consciousness to think globally but act locally," while emphasizing the engagement of communities beyond spectatorship (Cohen-Cruz 2005, 50). She includes both Roadside and Pregones as participants in this tradition and carriers of its legacies.

Both ensemble companies have, in fact, engaged in national and transnational collaborations over the years, while also emphasizing the alignment of their work with locally defined social justice and cultural agendas. Since its founding in 1975, Roadside, the first professional theater company in the Kentucky Appalachian Mountains, has consistently created and performed material rooted in local storytelling and musical traditions. Their methodology reflects a commitment to local people's participation in the creative process, and has been replicated in communities across the nation, mainly through workshops and collaborations with Roadside ensemble members (Cohen-Cruz 2005, 65–67). Similarly, Pregones, created in 1978 by a group of Puerto Rican artists living in New York City, has worked with local communities in the Bronx, the tri-state region, and nationally through collaborations involving churches, school and college educators, and community health, youth, and literacy leaders, among others. For these companies, audience members and communities are seen as participants, rather than end-receivers.³

Much like other contemporaneous ensemble companies, both companies have also invested considerable effort in forging alliances with translocal artists, ensembles, educators, and organizations. They are part of a community-based performance movement whose work is, as Cohen-Cruz asserts, relevant not only to those whose stories and concerns are represented in the work, but rather is "potentially of interest to anyone" (Cohen-Cruz 2005, 110).

The story told in BETSY! indeed reflects this interest in locally-grounded themes of broad appeal. The play traces "Puerto Rican" Betsy's ancestry through a long line of Scots-Irish female relatives first settling in Appalachia in the eighteenth century, which inevitably complicates her South Bronx, Latina identity. Betsy learns about the struggles of Scots-Irish immigrants and how this part of the family history was silenced from the moment her mother fell in love with a Puerto Rican musician—Betsy's father—and was disowned by her parents because of his race. Tales from ancestors fighting their way out of indentured servitude to discovering a love of jazz are told through songs of the Appalachian and Latin jazz traditions, aesthetically grounding the play in the legacy of both communities.

The story, however, also conveys a more-encompassing truth: originating in diverse and blended backgrounds, the details of our family histories often disappear over time due to self-imposed silences. BETSY! asks its audiences to ponder what views of ourselves, of this nation, and of identity categories are accepted and which ones are forgotten, inviting us to dig into our complex and interwoven genealogies. What are the painful secrets occluded in family tales, and who are we, as a nation and a people? Through the Scholars' Circle, the far-reaching scope of these questions would engage multiple, geographically dispersed communities in a dialogue about personal, familial, and national identity.

A common goal was, thus, to prompt dialogue and critical thinking in regards to culture, ethnic diversity, and identification. Our collaboration revealed a shared purpose between community-based performance and teaching in the humanities—the goal of transformative education, ongoing "audience" dialogue, and critical participation. Interestingly, while not discussing overtly where our various artistic, pedagogical, and community-development methods and benefits converged, the group moved along the collaborative process with an unstated complicity and implicit shared belief in the value of dialogue, participation, and critical educational experiences.

As is the case in community-based theater, however, we collaborators might have benefitted from a deeper discussion on methodology in order to successfully pursue this expansive dialogue. A productive point of departure for the exploration of these issues might have been, in retrospect, discussing Pregones's and Roadside's prior experiences in educational engagement. Consistent goals in their work have been both the cultural expression of local traditions and local empowerment. Both often rely on learning through dialogue and self-exploration, with the aim of achieving self-affirmation and cultural and social development. Both companies have often partnered with educators. Both recognize resonance in their practices with Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed, inspired by Brazilian theorist Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which sought to address social and economic issues of and with local communities through liberating educational experiences, self exploration, and critical participation in civic life (Boal 1979). Through alliances with other Latino/a and Latin American theater companies, Pregones in particular has historically incorporated elements of Boal's methodology over the years (Vásquez 2003, 86–93).

To the cohort of educators in the 2014 Scholars' Circle, the range of methodologies used by Pregones and Roadside was familiar to differing degrees. We did not discuss how or whether our own pedagogical or artistic methods converged with those of the theater companies with whom we were working, if they needed to, or how the Circle itself may have constituted an experiment in education through multi-venue dialogue. Similarly, we did not discuss how geography would impact our pedagogical choices. Had we considered our methodology more intently, we might have established a clearer sense of how scholars are best equipped to help engage new audiences and worked to create more opportunities for student participation earlier in the process. Our process, instead, was largely exploratory, pondering how our work as new "community/audience members" was important to our partners and our students as we went along.

 

Aligning Pedagogy with Content

While numerous artists and scholars have written about pedagogical approaches to collaborative or community-based theater-making, little has been published on methodologies for involving students in higher education in other aspects of such work. Ann Elizabeth Armstrong, for example, has written about how creating oral-history-based theater challenges college students to experience the tension between respecting and remaining open to the positions of those they interview, while simultaneously identifying their own positions, perspectives, and prejudices (Armstrong 2000). Sonja Kuftinec similarly argues that community-based theater-making is a form of active learning, engaging students and other participants in a process of questioning, reflection, and critique (Kuftinec 1997). Active participation is also emphasized in the report "The Curriculum Project: Culture and Community Development in Higher Education," which takes a broader focus, looking at Community and Cultural Development programs in US higher education.⁴ This survey of 231 artists and educators emphasizes the high level of importance placed on hands-on learning and direct community engagement (Goldbard 2008, 2).

The Scholars' Circle presented an important opportunity to explore the methods and benefits of teaching community-based arts outside of practice-based classrooms or workshops. The educators in the Circle adopted several pedagogical approaches to the study of BETSY! Although most of us taught at colleges or universities, almost none of us worked in formal applied theater programs, hailing instead from diverse disciplines and having varying degrees of experience in community-based teaching and cultural-development work. Many of us were inspired by participation in the consortium Imagining America. Most of us were geographically distant from Appalachia and the South Bronx, wherein BETSY! finds thematic and cultural inspiration. Both our pedagogical approaches and our students' points of entry into the play were, thus, marked by our disparate backgrounds and possibilities.

The Circle began with the assumption that students would need introductory resources. Nearly a year before BETSY! opened, Circle member Jonathan Bradshaw interviewed several other members about how they intended to "teach the play," and what tools or materials they felt they needed in order to do so effectively. Most agreed that students, especially those who would not meet the artists or attend the performance, needed access to dynamic, interactive multimedia content in order to highlight the complexities of community-based playmaking, particularly through in-process commentary from the artists themselves, as well as to provide students with a means to participate in the conversation. Technology provided a window into intercultural dialogue, as practiced by these long-time collaborators. Accordingly, Roadside and Pregones created new media documenting the creative deliberation that informed BETSY! This included video and audio interviews with composers, writers, and actors, clips of earlier iterations of the show, videos documenting rehearsals, and commentary from the artists while creative decisions were still in process. Students were also able to read the in-progress script and sometimes engage in face-to-face dialogue. We felt that we had "prepared well" by providing these multiple points of entry into the play.

Curricular integration, however, revealed a great diversity of experiential and conceptual points of entry. Some of the students, scholars, and community organizers connected to BETSY! via personal cultural history, some by learning about others. Some learned more about performance aesthetics, community art-making, or the community in which they live. The semester experience demonstrated that, while media and literature proved useful, they did not allow for a full exploration of students' complicated relationship to the play's creation and performance processes. Regardless of their different locations and in spite of the wealth of information made available, students benefited most from direct contact with the art and the artists—from in-person dialogue and engagement in the process. Greater personal contact with the play's creators and performers allowed them to position themselves as participants in a creative and reflective conversation that "mattered." Direct, in-person participation proved key not only in understanding collaborative arts-making, but also the play's content and purpose. We saw that, just like other communities participating in grassroots theater, students did not need information about the play, as much as to feel included in a conversation about issues of relevance to them and others. In retrospect, both authors of this article felt that our students would have benefitted from increased interaction with the artists and, possibly, other scholars in the Circle, and from participating in the design and goal-setting stages of the collaborative process.

 

Understanding Students as Stakeholders: Two Pedagogical Experiences

 

"Teaching in the South Bronx," Inmaculada Lara-Bonilla:

As a professor of US Latina/o Literature at CUNY's Hostos Community College, in the South Bronx, my central objectives were: a) to allow students with disparate cultural and academic experiences to appreciate the relevance of Latina/o literature—and literature in general—including the significance of writing and of the imagination, to contemporary communities; b) to introduce students to theater analysis; and c) to provide opportunities for sustained engagement with local professional artists. Firsthand experiences in dialogue and collaboration were, of course, primary elements in a methodology seeking to encourage students to develop meaningful relationships with local authors, actors, and musicians and ultimately to inspire a sense of belonging to these creative communities.

Nestled in the cultural and commercial hub of Grand Concourse and 149th St., and linked to a history of community struggle for ethnic, racial, and educational justice, Hostos Community College is very much part of the social and cultural fabric of the South Bronx. The college's history of grassroots and institutional activism has led to decades-long relationships with Bronx organizations, community leaders, artists, and cultural projects. The college's relationship with Pregones Theater was several decades long, as well. In this fertile landscape, students would not only engage with BETSY! and its creative process, but also with a rich history of collaborations of which they now could feel part, in its contemporary unfolding.

As Hostos students were introduced to Latina/o literature of the civil rights era, they learned that many of the poets, playwrights, performers, and fiction writers of the Nuyorican and other movements were alive and active members of our Bronx and New York literary community today. Students would be able to meet some of them and discuss some of the readings with them. This generated feelings of anticipation and engagement with the material. By the time students were presented with BETSY!-related digital and print materials, they had already begun seeing Latina/o literature as emerging in concrete communities and social contexts, created by real and relatable individuals and collectives.

As students learned about histories of migration or marginalization addressed in other poems, plays, and short stories, students read the BETSY! script seeking to understand the complicated history alluded to in relation to Betsy's Scots-Irish and Puerto Rican ancestors, especially as experienced by the disenfranchised women of the play. Students also researched the history of Pregones and Roadside, as well as the surveyed multimedia resources that the Circle had made available. Importantly, prior to their initial meeting with BETSY!'s creators Rosalba Rolón and Dudley Cocke, students also experimented with collaborative playwriting themselves, developing one-act plays on issues that they considered current and relevant to their communities. These critical and creative experiences prepared them to engage in conversation about the meaning and context of the play, and about creation as a collaborative process.

Students also wrote about the play. They attended the performance and participated in further dialogue with creators, actors, and audience members at the theater, taking part in a larger exchange and experiencing the interplay between live words, music, and dance. They knew that their writing on the experience would be part of a broad dialogue that included several communities of creators, critics, and students from different colleges and universities. Several students explained in their essays how attending the performance allowed them to "really understand" the play. They readily responded to questions that the creators posed for post-performance reflection: a) What surprised you? b) Who/What did you identify with or connect with the most? and c) How did you think the performance departed from the script, and was that a successful departure? Through this opportunity for further reflection, students connected the themes of the play with personal experiences of racism, difficulties in biracial relationships, or the relevance of music in their lives, and expressed how the play made them feel more curious about their ancestors and the issues raised in the play.

Overall, in-person activities were the trigger sparking student interest. In their course assessment, several of them identified these opportunities as the highlights of their entire semester. I personally observed how, while video, music, and other online resources were useful to introduce the play and engage students with larger, digital communities, it was our first visit to Pregones Theater and the conversation with Rolón and Cocke that made students truly curious and engaged. These meetings allowed them to enter spaces—physical, creative, and intellectual—that most had not experienced before. They became informed, critical, and creative interlocutors with the authors, exposed to the creation and production process, and saw for themselves how theater mattered to local communities in the South Bronx and beyond, including neighbors and other groups of students. Connection with real people and places added to their understanding the play and the significance of performance after digital and print resources had helped access the meaning-making process. Feeling included, welcomed, and valued by a local and trans-local community of artists and scholars led to an "emotional" understanding of the play and of the value of literature and theater beyond what any text in print or online or any isolated class discussion could have communicated.

While this experiential approach allowed students to become engaged "community" partners with local artist for a few weeks, longer-term impact is more difficult to assess. Opportunities for experiential and community-based learning would, ideally, lead students not only to engage more meaningfully with creative material, but also to appreciate its import to local and trans-local communities, and to reconsider their own relationship to writing, to the arts and artists, and to their communities, with their rich history and contemporary arts and cultural scenes. A future iteration of the project would include a follow-up plan for interactions and long-term relationship-building through the literature and the arts.

 

"Teaching in Connecticut," Lindsay B. Cummings

I had a very different experience. I taught the play in my undergraduate Latina/o Theatre course, in the Department of Dramatic Arts at the University of Connecticut. While the university is close enough to make a field trip possible, institutional regulations and student schedules made it impossible to require students to see the performance, though I did encourage them to see it. The students read the script, viewed several of the online resources, and read a short essay on the history of community-based theater.

My goals were, first, to use the play to prompt dialogue about complex racial and ethnic histories. Building on earlier conversations on transculturation and cultural hybridity, BETSY! expanded the discussion beyond concepts such as Gloria Anzaldúa's notion of mestiza consciousness by asking students how our sense of self and identity might be shaped by lost genealogies and what it might mean to recover them. Second, I wanted students to engage with diverse methods of playmaking. That is, I wanted to break down the "silo" in which community-based art often exists, including in course design. Within theater programs, projects like BETSY! are often taught exclusively in courses on theater for social change, community development, or related topics. Teaching these plays alongside more canonical and/or well-known works helps students see them as legitimate. This is not to suggest that community-based art should only be taught in this way; to do so would undermine a field that relies on direct engagement and already struggles to provide students with adequate time to work with communities (Goldbard 2008). Specialized courses and programs need to be offered with and alongside integrated curricula in order for the field to gain greater recognition in academia and beyond.

Working within the constraints of my situation, I created learning objectives that could be achieved with only access to the text and online resources, all of which helped explain the artists' goals and reasons for engaging in collaborative, intercultural, community-based playmaking. Unfortunately, while students were quick to appreciate the value of creating art this way, they seemed to find no personal points of entry into the material. This problem stemmed, in part, from the style and aesthetics of the piece. BETSY! is largely told through musical numbers, blending the popular musical traditions of Appalachia and Puerto Rico. We were fortunate that the artists shared the script and online video resources, and that I had seen an earlier iteration of the show. Nevertheless, students found it difficult to follow the storyline woven through the songs, and a good deal of time was spent simply clarifying the plot. Bradshaw's interviews with composers Ron Short and Desmar Guevara helped them understand the play's musical styles, but the initial stumbling blocks meant that discussion about family histories was not as rich as it might have been. When most of a class meeting is spent working through students' confusion, it can be very hard to springboard into engaging discussion. Classroom dialogue faltered, and what was usually a dynamic, democratic group exchange shifted into a more conventional pedagogical model, with students turning to me as the "expert."

This response altered dramatically for the small group of students who traveled to New York to see the production. Students were energized in the theater, caught up in the liveliness of the performers and audience. Eating together after the production, they spoke enthusiastically about hearing the two musical traditions blending together and spontaneously offered stories about their own family histories that they had been reluctant to share in class.

I believe that this has to do not only with the power of performance to communicate beyond the written word, but also with the fact that students experienced the play not simply as individuals, but as part of an audience. One student was struck by the sense of intimacy the performance produced and its attempts to create a feeling of community within the theater itself. This student identified various techniques employed in and around the performance to foster a sense of inclusivity onstage and with the house: band members sat on stage and interacted with the performers; Spanish supertitles allowed both Spanish and non-Spanish speakers in the audience to follow the action; a photo exhibit in the theater added a range of voices to the play's reflection on race and ethnicity in the US; and performers directly addressed the audience in the final musical number, extending the question "¿Y tu abuela dónde está?" ("And your grandmother, where is she?",—an idiomatic way of inquiring about someone's heritage in many Latin American and Caribbean nations) to all present. This student felt included and addressed, in spite of her awareness that she is neither Appalachian nor Puerto Rican, and noted how important this feeling was to the themes of the play. Another student felt that the play did an excellent job of expressing what it means to come from a mixed ethnic and socioeconomic background—a condition he identifies with. Whether the play spoke "for" them or not, students felt addressed and engaged.

This pedagogical experiment has led me to rethink how I integrate community-based theater into my courses. Whereas many theater and literature courses use art as a springboard for dialogue, I now want to flip the model when teaching these kinds of plays in more mainstream/integrated curricular situations. Dudley Cocke helpfully suggested using story circles as a way for students to explore their own histories in relationship to the themes of the play; Roadside often uses story circles following a performance. I initially thought that this might be a helpful classroom tool after students read the play. Now I believe story circles might better precede the reading experience, so students develop personal points of entry first. Educators often worry about students discussing ideas in the abstract, without the grounding of a text or object of study, but community development and community-based art rely on the knowledge of the community as its "grounding." Thus, even in courses not based on artistic practice, we might reorganize the traditional read-discuss-analyze model to foreground dialogue and the knowledge already in the classroom community.

 

Lindsay and Inmaculada

These two experiences suggest that we cannot separate pedagogy from the practices that inform community-based and popular art—even in classrooms that are not fully organized around related genres. While the videos and online resources were helpful, Lindsay relied on them too heavily, falling into a traditional model of "information delivery" that failed to honor the nature of the work being studied and was of limited pedagogical success. Inmaculada incorporated playwriting into the course and gave her students more agency by asking them to offer alternative endings to the play.

Both experiences would have benefitted from student input into curriculum design, articulating their goals for engagement in this process. Time restrictions imposed by the semester structure and other institutional demands pose challenges to faculty interested in teaching such material, which frequently takes more than the allotted time. Jasmine Torres and George Sanchez assert that "[t]o support students' full participation, we must advance student-led initiatives," while they recognize the difficult task of simultaneously navigating community processes, student needs, and institutional cultures (Torres and Sanchez 2015, 25).

Institutional cultures, of course, not only impact student learning and pedagogical planning, but also how scholars engage in research and publication. We turn our attention now to the issue of dialogue in scholarship and between scholars and artists.

 

Valuing Dialogue as Artistic and Scholarly Practice

The Scholars' Circle was structured to encourage dialogue among artists and scholars and across interdisciplinary boundaries. In this sense, it sought to produce scholarship through methods that align with those of community-based art. At the same time, the two theater companies and Circle members recognized the limitations of such methodology: most centrally, that the production of scholarship continues to be a contested site where single authorship is most highly valued by a majority of institutions, journals, and academic organizations. Thus, as we sought to engage one another in open, dynamic discussion, the Circle also created opportunities for independent writing and publication. The Circle could thereby support the work of the theater companies through scholarship that would also be recognized in academic venues as legitimate research.

Members of the Circle were invited to produce reflective writing that connected artistic practice, teaching, theory, and criticism in our diverse scholarly fields. Writing for the Howlround.com blog series "Beyond Cliché: Dramatizing Our American Identity," seven Circle members and two performers contemplated the play and its creation, each drawing on their own disciplinary background as well as Circle conversations. This form of public writing, along with more formal published scholarship such as this essay, strengthen the connection between theory and practice while also helping to create an archive of the work. The archive, in turn, potentially extends the audience to artists, scholars, and educators in the future.

Commitment to dialogue, such as underpins much of BETSY! scholarship, entails a willingness to entertain many points of view, to engage one another without necessarily coming to consensus, and to take part in conversations that evolve over extended periods of time. Thus, dialogue is not a step in an art-making process (i.e., we talk and then we create), but rather inseparable from the art itself. Similarly, the dialogue of activities like the Scholars' Circle ought not to be understood exclusively as the "research" phase of scholarship—a preliminary step leading to the production of more traditional scholarly texts—but as a form of scholarship. To rethink the place of dialogue in scholarly and artistic practice has at least two major consequences. First, we must recalibrate how we evaluate creative and scholarly "contributions," thinking not in terms of how much each member of a group contributes to the final product, but rather how a group functions together as a complex and interdependent network. Second, we have to expand our sense of artistic production and scholarly output beyond the seemingly, but never actually, finished performance/publication in order to encompass more open-ended, dialogically structured material.

In spite of widespread calls for collaboration and interdisciplinarity, which rely on dialogue, both arts funding sources and academic tenure and promotion committees still tend to value individual over collective work. This is not the result of hypocrisy, but rather a conflict between the desire to support collaboration and confusion over how to recognize and reward good individual work. Here, we focus primarily on collaboration in academia, the arena most familiar to us as scholars, while extending our discussion to consider what academia might learn from the arts.

As former Loyola University Chicago Provost Peter A. Facione writes, while there is broad consensus that "significant contributions to collaborative scholarship should be valued highly," that consensus is "as fragile as it is shallow" (Facione 2006, 38). Most university administrators are unsure how to determine what counts as "significant contributions." The underlying sense of uncertainty surrounding collaborative work leads many academics, particularly pre-tenured faculty, to avoid it, advised by department chairs and deans to postpone such work until after tenure (Page and Smith 2010). This advice perpetuates the sense that collaborative work is nontraditional, risky, and hard to understand. For both of us, who are pre-tenured, the decision to devote time to this essay was not an easy one to make, in spite of our deep commitment to the principles of collaboration and cowriting.

What if we didn't think about collaborative scholarship in terms of "significant contributions"—which academics often try to measure by a system of points or percentages? What if we thought about it more like a theater ensemble, where a person's contribution is not a matter of size, but rather of how well they facilitate group synergy? We might even use the analogy of a sports team. In arts and scholarship, there are important "assists"—acts that don't light up the scoreboard, but that nevertheless make those points possible. In an anonymous editorial in Genomics, a scholar in the sciences writes, "The promotion and tenure review criteria adopted by most academic institutions overvalue independence, and fail to recognize interdependence" (Soares 2015). Measuring the quality of a dynamic, synergistic exchange is different from measuring the percentage of each individual contribution to a final product—artistic or academic. In writing this essay, for instance, many ideas and paragraphs were written by one author only after a comment or prompting from the other. The dialogic process has shaped both of our thinking, leading to a very different essay than either might have imagined at the outset.

Collaborative writing is a dialogue. In dialogue, we learn about one another and about ourselves. Our ideas shift and evolve. Summarizing major tenets of dialogue theory, following Bakhtin, Julia T. Wood writes, "Dialogue is emergent (rather than preformed), fluid (rather than static), keenly dependent on process (at least as much as content), performative (rather than representational), and never fully finished (rather than completed)" (2004). Academic institutions would do well to look to arts organizations like Pregones and Roadside, for whom dialogue is not simply the exchange of ideas and perspectives, but the careful negotiation of varied points of view.

Just as students could have benefited from greater dialogue to enhance their learning, Scholars' Circle members needed more balance between the dialogic and the product-oriented aspects of our work. Some of our most productive and energized moments came in video conferences, when we engaged in debates about the nature of terms like popular theater, which evokes vastly different meanings for different people, or when we discussed our students' varied points of entry into the play and community-based theater making. After the play opened and the conversations came to end, there was considerable "encouragement" (positive, but with a sense of urgency) to continue the work in more "traditional" venues—conference panels, published articles, etc. This move to document, and thus be legible to funders and academics, is understandable and important, but it does reduce the sense of plurality and dynamism of the process. Writing collaboratively, as we do now, helps retain some of that dialogic ethos, but it still privileges the clear, uni-vocal argument over complex, shifting poly-vocality.

The question remains: How might we expand paradigms to value the emergent and open-ended in both arts and scholarship? BETSY! is a wonderful example: the piece has evolved over the course of three iterations, as cast members have come and gone, and ongoing ensemble members have explored new ideas together. Both theater productions and academic publications have a tendency to produce a false sense of finality, when in fact they are simply the work as it exists in the moment an audience appears (Lillis 2011). Ideas will continue to evolve, both for the artists/scholars and for the audience/readers. Valuing dialogue in arts and scholarship means valuing the contingent, the open-ended, and the poly-vocal. Practically, this might mean counting a letter from a collaborator that describes what an individual brings to a group process as roughly equivalent to an academic citation, as evidence that one's work is impacting the artistic/academic community. It might mean abandoning points systems for measuring "significant contributions" in order to send the clear message that dialogue and collaboration carry enough value to the academic community that we will support and encourage them. And it means counting artists and community members among a scholar's peers.

Dialogue is central to engaged art-making, engaged pedagogy, and engaged scholarship. As our experiences in the Scholars' Circle show, to be most effective dialogue needs to engage all participants (including students), to have a clearly defined methodology, and to carry through all stages of the process—from pre-project development to post-project publication and critical scholarship. In many respects, the Scholars' Circle revealed just how challenging it is to generate dialogue on this many levels, with this many geographically and demographically diverse communities. It also revealed how vital and enriching it is to attempt to do so.

 

Notes