Jenn Stephenson

Assessing teamwork in undergraduate education: a measurement tool to evaluate individual teamwork skills

Effective teamwork skills are essential for success in an increasingly team-based workplace. However, research suggests that there is often confusion concerning how teamwork is measured and assessed, making it difficult to develop these skills in undergraduate curricula. The goal of the present study was to develop a sustainable tool for assessing individual teamwork skills, with the intention of refining and measuring these skills over time. The TeamUp rubric was selected as the preliminary standardised measure of teamwork and tested in a second year undergraduate course (Phase One). Although the tool displayed acceptable psychometric properties, there was concern that it was too lengthy, compromising student completion. This prompted refinement and modification leading to the development of the Team-Q, which was again tested in the same undergraduate course (Phase Two). The new tool had high internal consistency, as well as conceptual similarity to other measures of teamwork. Estimates of inter-rater reliability were within a satisfactory range, although it was determined that logistical issues limited the feasibility of external evaluations. Preliminary evidence suggests that teamwork skills improve over time when taught and assessed, providing support for the continued application of the Team-Q as a tool for developing teamwork skills in undergraduate education.

Metatheatre and Authentication through Metonymic Compression in John Mighton's Possible Worlds

Self-voiding works of metatheatre pose problems for the authentication of fictional existence under the narrative model of possible worlds semantics. John Mightons play Possible Worlds shows how the creation of metonymic bridges can break through the barriers between worlds, allowing access to higher-order intelligence and thus to authentication. Authentication through metonymic compression is, however, a double-edged sword which while granting existence to fictional worlds simultaneously destroys those worlds. In Mightons play, this experience of rebirth in death is reiterated on three levels: by the character of George as he attempts to determine his ontological status, by the detectives investigating his murder, and by the audience engaged with metatheatre.

Singular impressions: Meta-theatre on Renaissance celebrities and corpses

Abstract Theatrical corpses and celebrities never fail to evoke a peculiar awareness of the performative nature of the play as a real-world event for the audience, and so both corpses and celebrities are always meta-theatrical. By applying a phenomenological model in order to separate staged objects into their dual components of actual and fictional noemata (virtual sense impressions), it becomes clear that these particular objects—celebrities and corpses—create a unique kind of meta-theatre, replacing the typical perceptual ambiguous duality of the fictional and the actual with an obstinately singular impression of the actual. Renaissance plays provide a rich and sophisticated field of examples wherein the plays pick up this essential meta-theatricality and construct second-level self-reflexive comments, playing variations on this basic perceptual problem. Ultimately, this analysis proposes a model that might profitably be applied to other instances of meta-theatre that present only a single actual noema, such as self-reflexive references to space and time.

Winning and/or Losing: The Perils and Products of Insecurity in Postdramatic Autobiographical Performance

Abstract:Billed as a “staged conversation” between long-time friends and artistic collaborators James Long and Marcus Youssef, Winners and Losers is an autobiographical performance event where the audience is invited to consider what the real-world dangers of this contest might be. What at first appears to be an amusing and satirical debate about “winners” and “losers” in popular culture and current events becomes profoundly uncomfortable, even unpleasant as the two protagonists turn on each other. Persistent reality-markers in this postdramatic performance render it difficult for the audience to discern the boundary between reality and fiction. The result is an acute indecidability, generating what Ulrike Garde and Meg Mumford call “productive insecurity.” The first aim of this essay is to contextualize Winners and Losers as a work of postdrama in the theatre of the real genre and to demonstrate how its destabilizing strategies operate to create productive insecurity. Second, the essay connects the play’s thematic anxiety pertaining to the insecurity of being “not safe” or being a “loser” with this disruptive paralytic audience effect. This doubled insecurity compels the audience to reevaluate the initial premise of the game and its habituated attachment to confident knowing. When the game messily implodes, audience members are left to ponder how to move forward (or really in any direction) in a world of pervasive uncertainty.

The Taming of the Shrew (review)

doorway in which she had first appeared, whether she had reached a new freedom (as her delivery of the final speech suggested) or merely traded in one frame for another (as Petruchio’s unashamedly unironic reaction to her speech suggested). This conclusion, alongside bulletin boards in the lobby presenting the critical heritage of the play, invited students and audiences alike to question the play’s closing and to reexamine the its genre and reputation. Ultimately, Katherine’s arc was not one of shrewishness to tameness, but of awkwardness to confidence, and that made this production a wish-fulfillment narrative that was not only smart and engaging, but particularly appropriate to a university setting. The New Mexico State University theatre department’s production of The Taming of the Shrew provided a marriage of a challenging intellectual interpretation with a creative concept that stretched the imaginations and skills of the university’s technical programs.