Faculty Scholarship

CLAIRE E. DEAL, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC
PAMELA P. FOX, ELLIOTT ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF FINE ARTS

ON RETURNING in the fall from her sabbatical leave, Associate Professor of Rhetoric Claire E. Deal assumed her duties as Director of the Rhetoric Program while continuing to direct the Speaking Center. In addition to teaching courses in oral rhetoric and composition, Deal offers workshops both for instructors on implementing oral activities in the classroom and for students across the disciplines on strategies for effective public speaking.

Deal’s research centers on the efficacy of experiential education, particularly servicelearning, as a pedagogical tool. In the fall of 2006, Deal led students in the Performance Studies course of Associate Professor of Theatre Shirley Kagan in a service-learning project at Piedmont Regional Jail. Students worked with a group of inmates enrolled in an acting course at the jail to create a performance piece drawn from the oral narratives of members of both groups.

Over the course of three months, students and inmates collaborated in all aspects of the production and in early December presented the work, Committed, to audiences at the Robert Russa Moton Museum in Farmville. Of particular significance to the collaborative theatre of testimony performance project was the stipulation that each actor portray the role of another, embodying his counterpart both physically and vocally, so that, as one inmate participant noted, he might “walk in another man’s shoes.”

Deal’s project at Piedmont Regional Jail allowed her to investigate the potential of service-learning to enhance students’ academic learning by linking the classroom curriculum with experiences in the “real world,” to meet a demonstrated need in the community for arts programming at the local jail, and to introduce students to the rewards of civic engagement.

The Committed project, too, enabled Deal to explore the assertions of scholars in performance studies that as a method of inquiry, performance allows participants, including audience members, to gain new understanding about themselves, others, and their culture in a way that traditional scholarly research does not or may not allow. Deal has presented her research in several forums, including two paper presentations, one at the American Studies Association conference in Philadelphia in October and a second at the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association conference in Boston last April.

Deal’s project at Piedmont Regional Jail followed an earlier project at the jail (focusing on documentary photography) that she and Elliott Associate Professor of Fine Arts Pamela P. Fox completed in 2003-2004. In the past couple of years, Deal and Fox have published numerous articles about their work, including articles in transFORMATIONS: Th e Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy, National Civic Review, and eSharp: electronic social sciences, humanities and arts review for postgraduates.

Deal and Fox also co-wrote “Living with Conviction: Connecting and Empowering Inmates and Students through Service Learning, Social Documentary, and Photography,” included in Civic Engagement in the First Year of College, a monograph published by The New York Times and the National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience and Students in Transition. In addition, they have had a chapter accepted for publication in Teaching Diversity, part of Anker Press’s Service Learning and Contemporary Social Issues series, to be published in Winter 2008. Deal is the single author of “Learning with Conviction: Service Learning, Social Documentary, and Transformative Research,” published in InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies.

Deal and Fox are active participants in national and regional professional organizations in their respective disciplines, Rhetoric and Fine Arts, and have presented co-authored papers at conferences across the country, including the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association conference in Atlanta, Georgia, in April 2006 and the Society for Photographic Education conference, Mid-Atlantic Region, at George Mason University in November 2005. Deal also discussed her service-learning work at the National Communication Association conference in Boston in November 2005 and at Columbia Teachers College at a conference entitled “Cultural Studies Matters: a Conference on Cultural Studies and Education” in April 2005.

Fox, who is a photographer and teaches photography at the College, has shown her work in two recent shows: In 2006 she participated in a Korean and American International Exchange Exhibition in Daegu, South Korea, an exhibition intended to foster dialog between American and Korean cultures; and in 2007 she had a solo show, “Imago Ignota,” at the Abercrombie Gallery at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana.

Deal, in addition to her teaching, administrative work, and research, serves on the Honors Council at Hampden-Sydney College. She is an active member of several professional organizations, including Delta Kappa Gamma, an international society of women educators; the National Communication Association; the American Culture Association; and the Eastern Communication Association.

She came to the College in 1999 with the B.A. from Mercer University, the M.A. from Furman University, and the M.F.A. from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and was promoted to the rank of associate professor in 2006. Currently she is a doctoral candidate in Cultural Studies at George Mason University and plans to complete work on her degree in 2008. The working title of her dissertation is “Theatre of Testimony as Critical Performance Pedagogy: Implications for Community Members, Theatre Artists, Audiences, and Performance Studies Scholars.”

Fox, who has been teaching at the College since 1993, was promoted to the rank of associate professor last spring. She holds the degrees of B.F.A. and M.F.A. from Virginia Commonwealth University.

BEYOND THE Classroom FOR THE Classroom
Hampden-Sydney College Faculty Scholarship 2005-2008
A report by the Office of the Dean of the Faculty