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As a specialist in the deeply pedagogical field of Applied Theatre, Sarah is passionate about fusing performance with education to create meaningful change in people’s lives. In her eleven years as an educator, she has found little more rewarding than mentoring young adults and fostering them away from simply surviving school to more fully thriving there.
She believes deeply in an interactive, engaged pedagogy in which students share responsibility for their own learning. Regular, active metacognition reflection exercises help her students to consider not just what to think, but how they think, helping them to develop vital critical thinking skills of lifelong value.
In 2017, she won the University of Missouri's very first Writing Intensive Teaching Award ever awarded to a graduate instructor for her work in a Script Analysis course that foregrounded composition skills for undergraduate students.
As an instructor of theatre and performance studies, Sarah aims to motivate her students toward moments of transformative learning by using a blend of critical thinking, metacognition, relational ethics, and empathy in her teaching and learning strategies. She anchors her pedagogy in the philosophies of Paolo Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed and Maxine Greene’s aesthetic education.
Scholarship
Scholarship
Sarah considers herself an artist-scholar; both of these roles are equally vital and work in tandem to ever more deeply inform her research and practice. She is a PhD Candidate in Theatre & Performance Studies who is currently planning for a 2022 graduation. She holds an M.A. in Theatre from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, along with Graduate Certificates in Grantsmanship, in Community Processes, and in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Sarah began her collegiate career at Belhaven University in Jackson, Mississippi where she completed her B.A. in Theatre with honors.
Her autoethnographic dissertation, “The Performance of Healing: An Autoethnography of Vulnerability and Care in Feminist Performance,” focuses on the roles of care, empathy, and vulnerability within performance and seeks to understand what performance demands of us emotionally, as well as what benefits it provides.
Sarah recently served as Assistant Editor for a volume of interdisciplinary contributed essays, Creativity in Theatre: Creativity Theory and Action in Theatre/Drama Education from Springer Publishing (Burgoyne, 2018.).
Sarah has served in a variety of academic service positions throughout the course of her graduate study, including University of Missouri Graduate Student Association President, Development Officer for the Women and Theatre Program of the Association for Theater in Higher Education, and Women’s Issues Committee Member of the National Education Association, among others.
References and CV are available upon request.
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