Unless you’re a member of one of the schools moving down to Temple Quarter, you may not be aware of one of the more controversial features of the campus: the lecture theatre ‘in the round’.
Although theatres in the round have been commonplace for hundreds of years, lecture theatres in the round are a relatively new development. The benefits they brings to the audience – or students, in our case – are multi-faceted, as Prof. Tansy Jessop, Mia Stevens and Mark France explained as part of our mock-up event last Thursday.
The event saw the Great Halls in Wills Memorial Building transformed into an imitation of the space to inhabit Temple Quarter, with IT Services, the Temple Quarter team and BILT coming together to invite colleagues to experience what the space feels like.
Prof. Tansy Jessop took to the stage and shared her vision for the space, highlighting it’s potential to disrupt the way we teach, create more dynamiclearning opportunities and diversity the pedagogy.
She sees three key ways that the space will change the way that teaching takes place with her ‘three c’s’: through encouraging conversation, creating more connections and allowing for more co-creation.
Teaching in the new space will be invitational, interactive and engaging, according to Prof. Jessop … but also slightly messy. She recognised that there are barriers to overcome with learning how to teach in this new environment.
Mia Stevens, returning SU-UG-Education Sabbatical Officer, then shared her experience as an English Literature undergraduate when one seminar tutor started taking the sessions outside in the circular garden in Royal Fort Gardens. She explained how it was the first time she truly understood education as a conversation, and the change in seating shape completely transformed the academic experience she had.
She went on to discuss the current challenge of students struggling with a sense of belonging, especially with the rise of recorded lectures and being ability to study from home. She believes that this new ‘theatre-like’ experience would create more of an ‘event’ and therefore students would be more likely to attend as the experience is so different to that of a traditional lecture, where sitting facing the lecturer can be a very similar dynamic to facing a laptop screen.
We need to look, Mia believes, at how students engage and who they engage with – and use the intimate experience of the lecture theatre in the round, to create more connections between both lecturer to student and peer to peer interactions.
The final presenter was Mark France, senior lecturer in the Department of Theatre and experienced actor and director. Mark moved fluidly around the room, coming up the seating aisles and darting from one side of the theatre to the other. He discussed the history of the theatre and how it is utilised to create a more intimate performance, engaging the audience and bringing them into the story. It removes the hierarchy of an end-on theatre and created a sense of community with the audience, as they can see how the others are reacting and feed off their reactions.
Colleagues were then given the opportunity to try the space out themselves in the afternoon and speak to Mark to get tips about how to best use the space. We will be releasing videos over the next few months with the best tips on how to teach ‘in the round’ and welcome any questions you have.
