Jane MacFarlane

Voice Coach/Sessional Instructor, Drama Division, School of Creative and Performing Arts, University of Calgary, Canada

Interviewed August 2020 by Martina MacFarlane

MM Jane, can you please introduce yourself?

JM I am a sessional instructor in the drama division of the School of Creative and Performing Arts at the University of Calgary. This is my third year teaching and, before that, I was a guest instructor with the drama division. I teach acting and voice for actors—meaning speaking voice, not singing voice. I am also the resident voice coach for Theatre Calgary, the voice and dialect consultant for Vertigo Theatre, and the voice and text coach for The Shakespeare Company. Before that, I spent fourteen years at Mount Royal University as Program Coordinator for the Performance Program. Prior to that I was teaching in the United States. Most of my work is live and in person, which of course, is tricky right now. Because there is no work in the theatre this coming year, I won’t be doing any of those other titles that I have, but I will certainly have my classroom studio work. This is with a small cohort, usually about twenty people maximum in a class who are all up on their feet working and present together. This is a really new world for us in theatre education as we try to figure out how to navigate the transition to remote teaching.

MM It certainly is. Jane, am I correct in saying that before COVID, you had not done any online teaching?

JM That’s correct—I am brand new to it.

MM Given that what you do is so physically based in that in-person experience, what has been the biggest challenge for you when moving to remote teaching?

JM It’s making sure the work is still strong, if that makes any sense. Especially when you’re teaching acting, it’s about the relationship between the two people and, when it’s through online delivery, you have to be much more focused and more integrated in a way, because it’s not the same as acting on film; strangely enough, it’s not like that at all. So that’s a real challenge because it’s so easy to be distracted. One of the things we always talk about for performers is that they need to be grounded and they need to be present. Anybody who has to give a presentation, they have to be really present and energetic and alive and it’s very easy for that to disappear in this medium. Zoom has been great because we can still contact each other, but it’s really easy to sit back and disconnect in a way that is counter to how my work goes. That was a huge switch in the spring when everything just suddenly shut down at the end of the semester.

We were supposed to do scene work between two people, and we tried but it just didn’t quite work. Figuring out how to do the group work was really, really challenging. We tried to have everybody except for the two people doing the scene turn off their cameras and microphones, and then that way have the two students talking to each other through the camera. So that’s one way. One of the other instructors who teaches directing did a collaboration with me so that her students, who were supposed to be directing scenes for live theatre, coached my students on their monologues. Instead of directing scenes, which just couldn’t happen because nobody could be in a room together, it was an opportunity for the directing students to really learn how to work with an actor. It was beneficial for them to have that opportunity to work quite intimately through this medium.

March 27 is World Theatre Day and we wanted to do something with the School of Creative and Performing Arts in the drama division. I said, why don’t I do a warm-up? So, I did just that, and 300 people from around the globe attended. By the end of June, it had had 1,200 views, so I thought, okay, maybe there’s something here. I started doing a weekly vocal warm-up through Zoom and people just set their time wherever they were to drop in and take the class, and I did it for free. I just let people come if they could and if they wanted to give me a donation they could do so as well. It worked really well, and everybody who attended had some voice training—not necessarily with me, but they understood the process and they knew what they were doing.

To begin the work is another challenge though, because voice is so physically based. It really requires me to be very clear in my communication. Doing classes like these online takes a little bit longer than being in a space together, where I am able to physically demonstrate. You’re helping the student understand what’s happening in their own body because you’re right there with them. Online, it’s a little harder to see what the students are doing physically. I can hear it and I can give the note, but the adjustments and the notes are a little bit harder for the students to pick up on. It’s tricky, for sure.

One of the great things I’ve found with online voice coaching is that I’ve started working with another organization in Calgary, Skipping Stone, which supports transgender people in their transition. I’ve been teaching voice for mainly trans women, understanding how to work their voice. It is a safe space for them regardless, as they are in their own place. They can experiment, turn their mic off and just follow along with me. Those have actually been really successful.

All my voice classes are actually in-person this Fall until the numbers spike, and then I’ll have to figure out how to do it again. With online teaching, I think the most important elements are the communication, being really specific about what I’m asking, and being really specific about what the expectations are and what the outcomes might be. I don’t like to deal in absolutes when it comes to outcomes but if I send you in the general direction, then the student has to be really responsible for where they think they are in the work and be able to articulate it themselves. The communication on both sides has to be really clear.

MM What other opportunities have you seen to be created by digital education?

JM Well, I think it is the freedom of it, right? This summer I taught a large lecture course that was asynchronous, so people could do it from all over the place. I had one student in Brazil and one student in China. Poor them though, because there were three Zoom meetings that were synchronous in the class, so they had to set their alarms. But there is a freedom in there. Again, as the instructor, you have to be really clear on your parameters—really clear on what the boundaries are around the assignments and deadlines. You have to communicate these over and over and over again. So, to give you an idea, I would record lectures, I would put messages in the news items on D2L and also send e-mails. I was making sure I was repeating the message at least three times. D2L offers that opportunity where I have all these different modes of communicating with the students because it’s really important, but I have to make sure I say it two or three times, as I would face-to-face.

MM What is your most-used software or tool for online teaching?

JM D2L, for sure. I have become the D2L queen. We are not very good about it in the School of Creative and Performing Arts; nobody uses it but me, I think. But now, we all have to get better at it, and I like D2L because it makes sure that there’s a contract between me and the student. All the information is available to them 24/7; they can get the information that they need about assignments and due dates because it’s all posted. I resist a little bit the idea that I need to be available to students 24/7 because when I was at university, I could not contact my profs on the weekend. So as for those kinds of expectations—forget it! You can wait and I can wait too. D2L has been really great and now I understand all the things that are available that help support the success of the student but also help me to make sure that the course runs really, really smoothly. So that’s great. And then, of course, the other thing is Zoom ... I wish I’d bought shares in Zoom.

MM I’m sure we all do! Are you using a lot of the features in D2L?

JM I use the Time Release. I tried to use YuJa to begin with, and I found it to be a really limited platform and really, really frustrating. Because I live with two filmmakers, I don’t find that the editing software in YuJa is very useful. For filming and sharing my lectures, I found it much easier just to have a closed YouTube channel of my own and then I could drop the lectures into the content. Even though there are great tutorials and guides for YuJa that are accessible through the Taylor Institute, and they made it look easy, I just found it a really useless tool, actually. I think that whatever you’ve got on your computer, if you know how to do iMovie if you’re a Mac user or if you’re a PC user, I think those built-in tools actually might be stronger than YuJa.

MM What is your favourite resource for teaching online?

JM YouTube, because for my course that I was teaching on creativity, I found so many things that I could use to fill out my lectures and make them more fun and interesting. I only have one thing blocked because I talked about how Robert Johnson, who was an African American musician, created the blues, and rock and roll. There is a myth about him, that he stands at the crossroads of rock and roll where he met the devil and sold his soul for his prodigious talents. The Rolling Stones credit him and this story as the inspiration for “Sympathy for the Devil” but I couldn’t use the YouTube track for the song! Everything else though, I could use to keep people watching. I was able to get access to and I was still using the library and putting up readings and things like that. The library and the copyright office were really supportive in helping me put up material to read. Then I’d go out finding complementary resources in the TED Talks and YouTube from the actual authors, so it was great to include that material in the lectures.

MM I feel like things in the next few months are very unclear at the moment, but what do you expect that higher education might look like, say, ten years into the future?

JM I know the answer is supposed to be more remote learning, but I think it will be less. I think one of the things that we are actually discovering is that what happens in the classroom is actually incredibly important. It doesn’t matter if you’re five in kindergarten or thirty-five in grad school, the contact between the instructor and student is crucial. The human connection and the ability to work together is lost on this platform. The human experience is all part of the learning process. We learn better when we are together.

I hope that in the future of higher education there will be smaller classes. I don’t think that will happen in the immediate future because education is changing so rapidly, particularly in this country, but I do think that down the line, in ten to twenty years, large lectures in person probably won’t happen; maybe large lectures asynchronously, but I think the further we go in our education, right through your undergraduate and definitely in your graduate degrees, that remote learning isn’t actually as effective.

One thing that we’ve learned is that we are creative individuals and when we have to pivot, we do it very quickly and effectively. One of the things that I hear a lot from my students is the stress of doing it this way. So that’s another reason why I think that we’ll do less of it. I think it will be combined more than it will be one or the other.

I know that the expectation about doing more higher education online is common if you’re speaking to Albertans, and that’s because we’re expecting government cuts. Remote education is a way for universities in the near future to try and generate revenue and perhaps that creativity will never be in-person again. I think we’re all lamenting the loss. If you look at people who have kids who should be in school and suddenly they’re doing home schooling, they’re realizing what those true aspects of being in that building with the teacher and their peers are all about and the strength of it. We learn better when we’re together.

Reflection

The pandemic education year 2020/21 proved to be a challenge in ways that I don’t think we anticipated after the quick pivot to online learning in the spring of 2020. Zoom provided opportunities for courses to continue but the intangible parts of one’s educational experience cannot be replicated via remote learning. It was particularly hard for students to stay engaged, to be present within the structure of the class and focused, and to feel successful in the work. I also think learning expectations and outcomes were compromised because the stress and challenge of remote learning were so great. While I was grateful to be able to continue teaching in any capacity, everything became a kind of survey course, because the hands-on nature of being in-person was lost. Students who are not as engaged, easily slipped through the cracks. Technology and Internet challenges exposed accessibility issues and the economic fragility of students who did not have great equipment or Wi-Fi. Having to tell students to turn on their camera, get out of their bed and be present at times was a difficult request because they were working in the only space they had and were dealing with huge mental health issues. The isolation made it very difficult for a majority of students to be able to do their best work. Being in person provides focus, energy and support in a way that online cannot. I think we learned that there are possibilities in terms of straight up, large lecture courses being delivered online, but the full educational experience is one that happens in a relationship with other people.

About

Jane MacFarlane is a sessional instructor in the drama division in the School of Creative and Performing Arts at the University of Calgary. She has taught at such institutions as York University, Harvard University, Southern Methodist University, Mount Royal University, and the University of Alberta. Jane is also a director, actor, and voice coach. She is the voice and dialect consultant for Vertigo Theatre, a voice and text coach for The Shakespeare Company, and the resident voice coach for Theatre Calgary, where she has coached over sixty-five shows since 2000. Along with teaching Acting and Voice for the Actor, Jane teaches Voice and Presence for a variety of sectors through her own business, Voice Activated, and is currently coaching voice training for Skipping Stone, a “nationally recognized agency that connects trans and gender diverse youth, adults and families with the comprehensive and low barrier access to the support they need and deserve.” She spent the spring and summer of 2020 pivoting her teaching practice to both remote synchronous teaching and fully online asynchronous learning.