This piece is part of a series by participants in the Summer 2025 Open Knowledge Fellowship, coordinated by the Mina Rees Library. Fellows will share insight into the process of converting a syllabus to openly-licensed and/or zero-cost resources, as well as their experiences teaching undergraduate courses at CUNY.

Alexandra A. Rego is a doctoral candidate in Theatre and Performance at the Graduate Center. Her dissertation, titled Vestigial Choreographies, traces histories of climate anxiety in the long nineteenth century, writing dance theories of ephemera and other material objects.

I spent my first year at Hunter College as a teaching assistant in a broad, survey-style Theatre course. My responsibilities included leading two discussion sections (twenty students each), grading assignments, and sitting in on lectures. The lectures were on the fourth floor of Hunter West, a narrow building often ascended through a series of tightly-clustered escalators. On several occasions, the following phenomenon made me late.

I would step onto the first escalator, ascending without difficulty until, in sight of the next floor, I would be met with a mass of immobile students. It would become apparent that the second escalator had been shut off. Students would cluster at the top of the first escalator to look for the elevators or stairs (not immediately locatable from the escalators), or simply step onto the immobile escalator and wait for it to move.

I applied to the Open Knowledge Fellowship because the escalators provoked a kind of frustration I have felt in the classroom time and time again. It is tempting to think about the escalators, or teaching as a graduate student as just an issue of scarcity. But there are other modes of transportation in Hunter West, and I don’t think I would have made it to the lectures on time if there were two escalators available per floor. I wanted to learn more about Open Education and Open Access resources to teach my students how to name, work with, and question the very mechanics of their education.

Theatre characteristically renders resource acquisition unsatisfying. Subdisciplines, departments, and individual scholars disagree on whether theatre is a live art, on when theatre qua theatre really emerged in the world, and whether it should be taught in a BA (as opposed to a BFA) at all. For generations of undergraduates to come, what does it mean to be a ‘live art’ in an era of binge-watching, IG Lives, and bootlegging? Surveys of Broadway audiences in 2024 suggest that more than sixty percent of theatregoers were white, with an average age of forty. Encouragingly – or not – both statistics are stark improvements on Broadway attendance before the covid-19 pandemic.

In the space of an undergraduate classroom, these statistics are impossible to ignore. I’ve worked with students who, if asked for an example of a play, would answer “Shakespeare” or “Hamilton”. Unsurprisingly, then, theatre is as difficult to teach as it is to learn. I do not think the answer to the ongoing gentrification of the art world is to flood undergraduates with websites, tools, subscriptions, names, and readings. The syllabus, which I provide physically and digitally, can often disappear amidst scripts and scores, videos, and written assignments. I am guilty of making this worse: by habit, I refer to all assigned material offhandedly as ‘readings,’ regardless of medium. I am hopeful that a deconstructed, interactive course site enlivens this material, highlighting the constituent rather than the named, memorized, and ultimately forgotten whole.

An Open Access site, of course, does not make attending theatre – from any tradition or perspective – free or affordable. But it can reimagine theatre and that dreaded moniker of a ‘live art’. I cannot snap my fingers and transport my students back to Rabindranath Tagore’s writing desk. I can structure my syllabus to put my students in closer proximity to Tagore and his world: we can listen to popular music, look at influential works of visual art, and read contemporary reviews. I can co-create my course with my students, and I can ask them, very directly, what they want to study.

Open Access resources are primarily digital, which is a barrier to access in and of itself. Digital resources do not constitute a monolith in discipline, medium, or tone. Something feels deeply ‘live’ about listening to a radio interview from 1962 through a college laptop, or looking at Sri Lankan mask on the website of an anthropological museum. We can sit with the obvious and less explored discomforts and complications of these objects in real time. If the average age of a Broadway audience member in 2024 was forty, what are the demographics of a classroom?

I’m thinking about the spatial and temporal contours of a classroom structured on cost-free and Open Access learning. At the moment, my proposed semester starts with Amiri Baraka and ends with Adrienne Kennedy, but ultimately, students’ suggestions and interests may upturn this schedule entirely. As adjuncts, part-time instructors, and graduate teaching fellows, there are glaring limitations on what one course, one site, and one set of resources can do.

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