Academics

STUDENT | EXTRA CREDIT

Study Guide
Shannon Buckley ’07 teaches Waukegan High School English students how an Irish play set in 1916 relates to their own lives.

By Cara Jepsen '86

As a dramaturg for The Plough and the Stars, Shannon Buckley '07 performed many tasks during a theater production process, including the creation of educational materials designed to enhance the experience of Waukegan High School students. (Photo by Suzanne Tennant)

Although Shannon Buckley ’07 is Irish American and spent nine years with the Trinity Irish Dance Academy, she’d never read an Irish play — let alone Sean O’Casey’s 1926 drama The Plough and the Stars — until it came up as part of her independent study project in dramaturgy last spring.
 
Set during the 1916 Easter uprising, the play is not easy to follow — even for an English and secondary education major with a minor in theater. 
 
“Sean writes phonetically to get the Irish dialect,” says the 21-year-old native of Western Springs, Illinois. “When you go through the first few pages there are so many political references to the situation in Dublin at the time that you don’t know what the characters are talking about.”
 
It’s not exactly the type of thing you’d expect to strike a chord with high school students.
 
Yet for her senior thesis Buckley created a curriculum around the play that made it come alive so vividly for three Waukegan High School English literature classes, 70 of them braved winter snowstorms to see the recent Garrick Players production of the play at Lake Forest — even though they received no credit for it.
     
Buckley drew on her own research and that done by the students in Assistant Professor of English and Theater Richard Pettengill’s dramaturgy course to create a 50-page student guide and a 60-page teacher’s guide that included biographical information about the author, a glossary of terms, historical information, and discussion questions that tied it in to their own lives.
     
“I gave her guidance but she has that gift of being able to run with an idea,” says Pettengill, who served on Buckley’s thesis committee and created educational materials for disadvantaged high school students as a dramaturg for Chicago’s Goodman and Court theaters in the 1980s and 1990s. “It’s exciting to work with a student who is so self-directed and capable.”
     
Thesis advisor and Professor of Education Dawn Abt-Perkins put Buckley in touch with Waukegan High School English teacher Kathy Babcock — a friend who earned her teaching certificate through the College in 1985. Buckley agreed right away to present the materials to her classes. “I saw it as a way to give back to the College because they’ve given me so much in terms of background and foundation,” she says.
 
The College’s education department has a 12-year relationship with Waukegan schools, and Buckley served as an intern last year at Juarez Middle School. “You learn different methods in the course in Waukegan, about cultural teaching and how to relate a text to a diverse culture, so I already had a background working with Waukegan students,” says Buckley, a Phi Beta Kappa who spent last spring writing her thesis while student teaching at Deerfield High School and modeling for the Ford agency to help pay for her education.
 
Buckley learned from Babcock that Waukegan High School has the highest military volunteer rate in America and that one of three students is in Reserve Officers’ Training Course (ROTC). “Right away there was an instant connection to the play because one of the major themes is patriotism and how far you go for country versus family,” Buckley says.
      
Waukegan student Ana Gayton, who was in ROTC and will study nursing at Milwaukee’s Alverno College next fall, found Buckley’s study guide extremely helpful. “It showed different themes that have to do with what our current society is living through, like conflicts with relationships and religion and different views on war, which also ties in with what’s going on today, like the Iraq war and everything,” she says. “It opened my eyes to a whole new world.”
 
Buckley also sent dramaturg Elizabeth Derry ’09 and some of the actors in Lake Forest’s production to Babcock’s classroom to act out scenes and discuss the play. “They did the Irish accents, so it was easier to understand the way they talk,” says WHS student Ana Sierra, who will enter the College as a first-year student next fall. “If they hadn’t come to class, we wouldn’t have known how to understand them.”
 
Buckley was impressed when they came to the College to see the play. “They were watching and laughing at the appropriate times,” she says. “At one point in the play a character is dressed up in an elaborate Irish army outfit and another character says, ‘You look like an illegitimate son of an illegitimate son of a general from the Mexican army.’  It’s a very strange reference. But the whole group of kids exploded when this happened.  One kid behind me said, ‘They just insulted Waukegan!’ The fact that they saw that and knew what was going on was really cool.”
 
Pettengill says her project created connections between disciplines that sometimes seem disparate. “Shannon has really exemplified the power of liberal arts by doing academic work and research and making it matter in the world. She’s found a way to make a change and affect people’s lives with the work that she’s done.” 

Cara Jepsen ’86 is a freelance writer based in Chicago.