By Elizabeth Coen and Mary Manning
In the winter of 2023, I (Elizabeth Coen) partnered with my colleagues in the University of Houston Libraries, Mary Manning (Performing Arts Curator) and Madelyn Shackelford Washington (Head of Information and Access Services) to reimagine the curricular design of an undergraduate survey course called “American Drama,” which is offered each spring and satisfies a university core curriculum writing requirement.[i] The objective of our collaboration was twofold. We wanted students to think deeply about the nature of representation in American theatre, and whose voices are traditionally privileged in play anthologies and theatrical productions and whose voices are not. We also wanted students to examine these privileges and gaps through primary and secondary source research—through group discovery and “play” in the archives and in the stacks. I integrated the research component to assist students in making strong, well-substantiated claims about the portrayals and preservation of American stories for the stage.
When my Libraries colleagues and I began the curricular design process, we did not consciously center “play” in our course imaginings. However, upon reflection, we see that it is an apt metaphor for the student experience. The curricular content is framed as a problem of scholarly curation with real-world applications. We challenge the students to resolve it by posing the following questions at the start of the semester: “If this course was conceived to read the plays that constitute American drama, what are those plays? How do you curate a myriad of American perspectives and cultural experiences in one reading list?” In the two weeks that follow, they work in teams to investigate relevant collections in the archives and identify plays for the course syllabus. This pedagogical strategy, inspired by Cathy Davidson’s writings on “collective syllabus design,” encourages students to make choices about what they learn and how they learn it.[ii]
To help students get started and fully engage with primary source research, I select a diverse set of playbills and theatre brochures (circa 1945–2000) from various special collections. These items represent commercial Broadway productions, seasons of plays presented at non-profit theatres across the country, and a range of performances in the Dr. Nicolás Kanellos Hispanic theater collection. Students work in teams of five to create a dataset of plays from their assigned collection and then conduct additional primary and secondary research to choose one play for the course syllabus.[iii] This list of six plays forms a student-created canon that the entire class explores together for the remainder of the semester. Thus, the student teams develop a “playbook” that begins in the archives, moves to the main library stacks, and ends in the traditional classroom, all the while being coached by two information literacy professionals and the course professor.
Learning in the Archives
Elizabeth, Madelyn, and I (Mary) have collaborated on this course for the past three years and will again in spring 2026. In the first of three visits that the American Drama class makes to Special Collections each semester, I provide a brief introduction to “archives,” what they are, how they are created, and by whom. Implementing learning objectives from the Guidelines for Primary Source Literacy, especially where they correspond to Research as Inquiry in the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Framework, I provide possible reasons behind gaps in the historical record, explaining that records may be missing, may not have survived, may not have been collected, or may not have been made publicly accessible. I encourage students to critically examine the records for silences, gaps, contradictions, and indications of power dynamics.
As they work together, I visit each team separately. Together, we review the notes in the finding aid, especially those related to acquisition and provenance. I also share what I know about the creators and the collections that might not have made it into the finding aid. When this information is incomplete, students analyze the documents themselves to construct a broader understanding of the collection’s origins and its creator.[iv]
In archival sessions two and three, the teams build their datasets of representative plays for further investigation. At the same time, they begin to recognize gaps in the historical record and see how archives have historically privileged the wealthy, powerful, and dominant culture. This is especially striking when students from different teams compare their findings as part of group discussion. One student working with a binder of Broadway playbills from the 1960s noted that the missing voices of marginalized people were “deafening.” In contrast, another student assigned to the Dr. Nicolás Kanellos Hispanic theater collection remarked “I had no idea the history behind Latino and Chicano theatre was so rich.”[v] This collaborative team learning experience enhances their understanding of the materials.
Another student assigned to the Dr. Nicolás Kanellos Hispanic theater collection
remarked “I had no idea the history behind Latino and Chicano theatre was so rich.” This
collaborative team learning experience enhances their understanding of the materials.
Conclusions
The goal of this post was to briefly reflect on how students in a dramatic literature survey course can embark on a journey of play and engagement in archives. We also emphasize that additional library research instruction outside the archives greatly enhances this process. To take a case in point, after the teams assemble their dataset in American Drama, they work with Madelyn to locate the plays in the main library stacks and read newspaper reviews and journal articles to understand their historical significance.[vi] This additional work ensures that the student-created reading list often includes titles from the established American canon, like Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, as well as titles typically omitted from anthologies such as To be Young, Gifted and Black by Robert Nemiroff. In sum, a play-based approach to teaching with primary and secondary sources gives students the tools to conceptualize how disciplinary knowledge is iterative and constructed. They learn that methods of inquiry are just as important as content.
[i] At the time of our collaboration, Madelyn was the Head of the Music Library and liaised with the School of Theatre and Dance, too.
[ii] See Cathy Davidson, The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux, 2nd Edition (New York: Basic Books, 2022), 265-266 and Cathy Davidson and Christina Katopodis, The New College Classroom (Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press, 2022), 63-67.
[iii] Each collection generates a dataset of approximately fifty plays and the students in each group divide the titles evenly among themselves for further research.
[iv] For example, while we did not have much information on the collection creator Robert Weinberger, the students could paint a surprisingly good picture of him. From the dates on the enormous number of playbills he collected, they gathered that he was a frequent theatergoer, often attending more than once a week and sometimes multiple times a day. The students speculated that a person who could afford to attend theatre so frequently in Houston, New York, and Europe had means and leisure time. The collection reflected the collector’s tastes and biases, so the sorts of plays that Weinberger did not appreciate were not in the collection. The students noted that the collection helped us understand the collector, theatre, and society when Weinberger was a theatergoer.
[v] As quoted in Esmerelda Fisher’s article “UH Theatre Students Design Course Reading List,” University of Houston Libraries, accessed December 12, 2024, https://libraries.uh.edu/music/news/uh-theatre-students-design-course-reading-list.
[vi] In cases where plays cannot be found in the UH stacks, Madelyn assists students in making interlibrary loan requests or arranges for a copy to be added to the University of Houston’s play collection.
Elizabeth Coen, PhD. is an Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Houston. As a theatre historian and teaching specialist, her research aims to highlight the value and utility of arts and humanities programming to leaders in education and public policy. Her forthcoming article with Performing Arts Resources (2025) explores effective methodologies for integrating research and informational literacy skills into course curricula.
Mary Manning MA, MLIS is the university archivist and curator of Performing Arts Research Collections at UH Libraries Special Collections. Manning’s research includes academic libraries and archives and Houston and regional music. She is a past president of the Society of Southwest Archivists and values documenting the diverse history on campus and in the region.