"All Our World on Stage"
Developing Multimodal Writing Skills through Asynchronous Collaborative Performance Projects
Becky Goldberg Petty & Christopher Petty · in Teaching Writing Across Theatre and Performance Studies: A Resource Guide (eds. Yates & Higgins), Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History
OER coming soon View on Springer
About the Chapter
Co-written with Christopher Petty, this chapter tackles a specific classroom problem: theatre and performance pedagogy has always leaned on in-person collaboration, and that gets much harder to replicate once a course moves online and asynchronous. We wanted to know whether the collaborative, skills-based heart of a theatre classroom could survive that shift, and what it would take to make it work.
The chapter lays out a five-week project structure built in three phases: Research and Development, Marketing, and Audience Outreach. Each phase scaffolds students toward producing and promoting a multimodal, performance-based project, with the structure designed to balance individual accountability against genuine group collaboration, which is often the first thing to break down once a class goes asynchronous.
The framework is grounded in a real course implementation and the engagement research behind it, so it is offered as something other instructors can actually replicate, not just a theoretical model.
Why It Matters for Learning Design
This chapter is the peer-reviewed proof behind a belief that runs through everything we build: structured narrative and collaborative performance are not just enrichment activities, they are legitimate tools for teaching skills that are otherwise hard to reach in an asynchronous classroom. The same thinking that shaped this five-week framework is what shapes our AI Character Simulations today: give learners a real scenario to move through, with structure underneath it, and the skills stick.