Katie Larson, a Professor in UTSC’s Department of English, looks back on some of her favourite memories in the Andrews Building.
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0:05
[Christine:] Do you have any favourite teaching moments that you’d like to share? [Katie:] So, oh, so many.
0:15
The one that came to mind when you, ‘cause you mentioned physical space when you asked the question, and both in the Humanities Department and in the Department of English, I have been primarily located in the Humanities Building, the Andrews Building, which, as a physical space, is pretty iconic for the campus and which I love actually.
0:34
I love it in all of its eccentricities and I especially love the proximity to the valley and the light that, the part of the building that extends over the H-Wing patio. But many of my classes have been in that building as well
0:54
and I often ask students, so my courses focus on 16th and 17th century literature, I have particular interests in women’s writing
1:05
and also intersections between music and literature. And I would say over the last 10 years, especially, many of my upper year seminars have focused on aspects of gender and sound
1:23
and looking especially at performance texts, and the ways in which sound and silence are registered in these texts. And we often look at examples that wouldn’t necessarily,
1:38
at first glance, be considered obvious performance texts, so say, dramatic works by women, where we don’t have a clear performance history as compared to texts like Shakespeare’s plays.
1:50
And so I often invite students to experiment with performance in my classes. And invariably this is an assignment that students are anxious about.
2:04
And over the years, in some cases I do it as extra credit, sometimes I do it as a group option, where it’s sort of a low stakes assignment, or it’s an add-on to a larger project.
2:18
But I will never forget one of the performances that a group of students did, it was a scene from Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure, and they transformed one of the classrooms in the H-Wing
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into this amazingly lavish set really, for or scene for The Convent of Pleasure and invited myself and their classmates into this space where they had just, they had had so much fun experimenting with this text, and it was just a wonderful performance.
2:55
And that assignment in particular, where I feel like students over the years, I’ve seen them take creative risks in ways that they have ultimately really come to enjoy and learned a lot from,
3:07
but that particular moment of walking into a classroom, you know, that I entered dozens and dozens of times, and having it be completely transformed was one I will never forget. [Christine:] That’s wonderful.
