Writing as Performance

2025/ My Teaching Philosophy

One of my favorite books is Gregory Nagy’s Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond. The book traces the history of oral traditions in literature highlighting Homer and the medieval traditions. He threads the story around two main concepts, mouvance and variance. Mouvance means “constant motion.” The works of oral traditions are in constant revision by the storytellers as authors, not just carrying the story, but recomposing along the way. Variance has to do with textual changes in a work as it evolves toward what becomes considered the final version.

The creative tension between mouvance and variance accounts for the historical development of a work that originates in the oral tradition, changing with each telling, and ultimately enters the canon of literature. Even today, as we have numerous translations of great works such as Homer’s Odyssey, each translator enters changes of interpretation and nuanced meaning, much as a troubadour would tell the story in a voice where both mouvance and variance are authorized by reputation and audience.

Another point made by Nagy is the meaning of educare, the root of educate and education. It is to draw water, as a tree seedling draws water from the ground to grow into its full potential as a robust oak tree. We draw from the well of knowledge to guide students to fulfill their full potential.

My teaching philosophy is summed up in my approach to Writing as Performance. I seek to draw students to discover and nurture their own authentic voice. I seek to engage them in a lifelong adventure of writing as they advance in their careers. Every career entails writing to some extent. A firm grounding in writing from experience and confidence in one’s own authentic voice will enhance the success of all students. My teaching philosophy aims to accomplish these goals, collaboratively, with peer interaction and opportunities for writing in-class in real-time.

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The Origins of Writing as Performance

I grew up in a science family surrounded by books and rich conversation. I was equally at ease with the spirit of scientific inquiry and the theatrical energy of literary imagination. I knew myself to be a writer at a young age. I entered college with a strong background in both science and literature, so I chose a major that would expand my horizons– Intercultural Communications. On a quarter-long study tour through Mexico and Central America, I found myself on a hillside in Cuernavaca attending a seminar given by Jonathon Kozol, an educator and writer who had just authored Death at an Early Age, which chronicles the plight of urban youth in Boston inner city schools. It was on that hillside that I decided to dedicate my life to the service of education– to help students reach their highest potential through what I could personally do best: teach writing.

A year later, I encountered the art of mime and immediately saw it as an extension of my writing and as an educational tool of intercultural communications. I saw the performance of Marcel Marceau at the University of Minnesota. Subsequently, I had the opportunity to study directly with him, and with other top tier international mime artists. I perceived mime as the scaffolding underlying language. It contained the imaginative infrastructure of narrative story. A mime show must be crafted with crisp clarity and Hemingwayesque economy. Mime gave me the focus to distill my writing to its essence. Mime became, for me, not only a medium of professional performance, but also an educational tool, a key to unlocking the potential of students, to motivate and help structure their writing.

Writing as Performance: From Inspiration to Practice

Over the next two decades, I developed a method that embodied my philosophy of guiding students to tap into their personal experience, to find their authentic self-expressive voice, in their own words, and to motivate confidence in their capabilities as writers, in any genre. On the surface, Writing as Performance is simple and straightforward: Read Aloud, Mime Along, Write About, Perform & Publish.

I would enter a classroom or auditorium of students– at any level, Kindergarten through College– initially to perform. I would present a highly professional show, a mix of comedy based on everyday lived experience and tragedy based on stories drawn from classical literature and world mythology. I would then engage the students in a theatrical mime warmup comprised of rollings, stretches, and specific mime techniques. I would lead them in participatory mime games of mouvance and variance, in order to practice and get comfortable with the imaginative demands of movement and creativity. An example is passing around an invisible box, opening it to reveal an object inside, using the technique of Shape + Action, to be concise as nonverbal communication, not a guessing game.

Then comes the crucial moment! Have the students take out pen or pencil and paper. I instruct them to write in their own words: a story, description, poem, or song, of several lines or paragraphs, related to what we have been discussing, drawn from personal or imaginative experience. “Oh, by the way, you will then read your writing aloud to your peers as they mime along!”

In other words, the ACTIONS have to be described clearly enough with picturesque words that can be immediately interpreted and performed on the spot. For the next ten or fifteen minutes, or longer– in real time– the only sound would be the scratching of writing utensils on the surface of paper. I would walk about to glance at the progress, occasionally commenting with encouragement or intervening to help a student overcome momentary hesitance. Then, at some point, everyone would be ready and eager to share their work. I would field a volunteer to READ ALOUD and others to MIME ALONG. The audience would both hear the story and see it enacted.

Here is where my expertise as a mentor and coach would kick in. I would listen intently to the writing and watch how the sequence of action unfolded. After each READ ALONG & MIME ALONG I would critique the writing by commenting on the action. Their first critique was always applause from the audience of peers. I would then lead a brief discussion, asking students to consider how the performance matched up with the words. “Notice how when you wrote they walked down the street that your cast of characters might have needed more detailed description. How were they walking? How did you imagine the action to play out? Tell us more! Show us! How would we express it in words?” As members of the class would pipe up with suggestions, I would offer new vocabulary words. The author would enthusiastically get the point and revise the writing to refine the intended meaning. Everyone would FEEL GOOD. So the students’ confidence and motivation to write was ENHANCED. No red circles around misspellings and questionable grammar– that could all be handled in a later revising process.

In hundreds of variations of this scenario en mouvance, I personally reached over a million students. I was the catalyst for over a million stories written, read aloud, performed, critiqued, and revised. I listened to every story. I watched every performance. I can recall the countless faces of students as they lit up with delight. This resulted consistently and observably in better writing.

Every day I came up with innovative approaches. While I never let it become canned or routine, the basic sequence and scope of Writing as Performance remained constant, even as it evolved with mouvance and variance.

Writing as Performance in the world of STEM Education

All the while, I was honing the dual crafts of my own works of mime and writing, as I advanced in my career. As a result of seeing me in action, a project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) hired me as an Education and Public Outreach Coordinator for a variety of flight projects for Solar System Exploration. I was invited to apply my techniques to communicate the complexities of space science and engineering technologies: STEM Education. Intercultural Communications, indeed!

I flourished in an atmosphere that brought my background in science and literature together! Along the way, I pursued my Masters and Ed.D. and taught at Loyola Marymount University.

Teaching Composition to College Students

As I worked at the college level, I was confronted with the truth that most incoming students are woefully unprepared for the writing demands of the academic and professional worlds. How could my experience in the K-12 world translate to help college students succeed and reach their potential?

The students I encountered felt pressured to succeed, by any means necessary. They wanted fast track learning in order to get the grade that would get them in to the next college of their choice and ultimately into a well-paying job in the real world. They sought SHORT CUTS with an attitude of “Professor, just TELL-ME-WHAT-I-NEED-TO-DO to get a good grade”– and move on. This was a generation used to communicating in brief texts, quick videos, and casual conversation. A generation of social media and instant search engines to yield quick answers. Let alone discerning the quality or source of information. Enter our era of Artificial Intelligence. In the proliferation of AI tools, I detect a troubling impatience with the sheer TIME it takes to read in depth, to WRITE, CRITIQUE, and REVISE, and to trust the values of integrity and originality.

What do such students need and how can I address their needs?

If you have ever been immersed in great works of literature– Homer, Ovid, Dante, Chaucer, Aeschylus, Shakespeare– you realize that the entertainment industry has capitalized on that rich treasure trove, from Marvel heroes and Star Wars to TV situation comedies. The shrug that college students often display, indicating a view of the classics as esoteric, tedious, and stuffy, has to do with how they have been exposed to such literature. It is incumbent upon a teacher of composition to be judiciously clever and selective to guide students to perceive those kinds of connections.

To get writing to happen, you have to get reading to happen. Here’s a Writing as Performance technique that I have found to be highly successful when introducing a challenging literary work. In class, announce an approach to the book in the spirit of scientific inquiry. Have students browse to find a brief passage from anywhere in the book. The object is to select an interesting passage to READ ALOUD. Once accomplished, have the students form small groups as “research squads,” where each student reads their selection to the members of the group. As a group, the research squad decides on which passage to highlight and perform before the whole class. So what have we done so far? Each individual student has selected what they consider an interesting passage. Each research squad has heard five or six such passages read aloud. Next, they select one passage to highlight and perform, which means they need to select a reader and performers, then discuss and rehearse, arriving at some consensus of the meaning of the selected passage.

Then we list the page numbers of the highlighted passages to set an order of presentation. Students then present what is, in essence, a movie trailer of the book.

Now every student has invested some time and energy, in a fun way, to enter the work with theatrical energy. This would be rounded out by having a representative of each research squad evaluate and share a critical review of the “Movie Trailer,” which sets the tone for subsequent class discussions.

This takes advantage of the students’ preference for learning in a context of social interaction– framed by the work at hand. Each student, in reading aloud, has experimented with the VOICE of the persona projected by the author. They experience the power of elevating their own voice. Whether it is poetry, a novel, a science article, or an academic essay, this technique breaks the density of the writing into comprehensible chunks and becomes a collaborative, experimental enterprise. No one is “put on the spot.”

Addressing the Plagiarism of AI

How do we deal with the desire of students to take short cuts?

Here’s where it becomes important to develop an atmosphere of self-respect and integrity. This entails a cultivated relationship between professor and students.

The key is to guide students to discover and embrace their own authentic voice, and then to realize that, like a ventriloquist, they can cast their authentic voice in a variety of guises, genres, tones, and levels of rhetorical discourse, depending on the variables of PURPOSE and AUDIENCE.

Analogous to an acting class, I help students understand that they can access a persona that remains their own voice. They learn to convey the elevated tone for the purpose at hand and the intended audience. It also involves the attainment of the flexibility to move seamlessly from one genre to another– poetry, essay, scientific, technical, lesson plan, policy argument, letter to a colleague. Students learn to calibrate their writing by matching their word choices and rhetorical tone to the purpose at hand in order to deliver on demand.

This capability is rooted in the pride of ownership in one’s own authentic voice, to engender trust in one’s own capacity and not rely on others’ work or Artificial Intelligence (AI). I face the problem of AI head-on. I invite students– again, as research squads in the spirit of scientific inquiry– to invoke an AI composition around a particular assignment. I have them document their input and print out the AI-generated output. Then I have them “authenticize” the AI composition. That is, go through and “listen” to the AI-generated voice in comparison to their own– the wording, tone, and meaning. Make the necessary changes. Then come to class with the documented input, the marked-up AI output, and their revised version, in their own words. I would then have them share and discuss their findings collaboratively within their research squad groups, and report out.

My hope and intention is to STRENGTHEN student confidence in developing their own authentic voice and growth as authors. My purpose is to help them realize that ACTUAL INTELLIGENCE is still superior to ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE when it comes to originality and integrity. The learning process of using their own thinking and writing process will serve them in their journey of lifelong learning and career choices.

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No matter what career direction, the ability to write clearly, concisely, energetically, and confidently is a fundamental key to success.

My philosophy is to teach the practical skills of writing in many genres, in a nonjudgmental atmosphere of collaborative enterprise, to impart the love of language and literature, both structurally and aesthetically, and to instill a healthy pride and confidence in one’s own authentic writing voice.