Drama
Carrie Kaplan is a professor in the Drama Department at Austin Community College (ACC). She is a proud alumna of Dartmouth College (B.A., English), Queens CUNY (College University of New York) (M.S., Ed.), and the University of Texas at Austin (M.A. and Ph.D., Performance Studies), as well as a Harvard Mellon Fellow in Performance Studies and Research. She has been teaching Theater Appreciation at ACC since 2015, served as the departmental Literary Manager and Dramaturg for productions since 2016, and has tutored for ACC since 2020.
How has your community college teaching experience shaped your character over your career?
I believe strongly that community is a central pillar of character; from a theatrical perspective, character is a performance of a self, a lived realization of a core script of beliefs and unique spirit. Its where ideas, ideals, aspirations come into direct conversation with the human in all its imperfections-and as on the stage and in real life, is best understood through its actions. And what is a performance without an audience/what is a character without its position in a community? Community college teaching has asked me over and over again to find relevance for my own passions, find common ground with students from so many backgrounds and different ways of learning and seeing the world. Semester after semester, community in the classroom is something new. It has pushed me to keep defining what I believe in enough to teach about it. At the same time, it has also supported me and held me in community-through fellowships to research the neuroscience behind empathy development and how that can be conveyed in arts classrooms, to find new areas of growth in my teaching, and through department chairs and deans who have fostered me as an artist/activist/educator and allowed me to create my own roles within the department, task forces, and interdisciplinary collaborations. It has both solidified my beliefs/made me better at acting on their behalf, and allowed me the opportunities to evolve, adapt and keep growing my character in line with my spirit.