The sound so vibrant and rich, the tone so vivacious, the gesture so pulsating, and the emotion so poignant and touching, it brought tears to the eyes of the audience as they listened to the recitation of the “poem”—or what they thought was a poem.

“It was done in Russian by a renowned actor from Russia,” my father said as he described the performance, conducted by a visiting Russian actor to his theatre troupe in China in the 1950s. Although none of the Chinese audience could understand a single word of it, they were completely mesmerized by the presentation—until one of them raised the question: what is it saying in the poem?

No, it wasn’t a poem. With a short pause, the actor revealed, through an interpreter, what he was reciting—a restaurant menu!

So with all the feelings and passions he could project, he was reciting something like cabbage rolls, fish sautéed with onions and mixed with hard-boiled chopped eggs and, oh, potatoes mashed then mixed with eggs and smetana!

This story came to my mind as I started to plan for this year’s DePaul Annual Faculty Conference with colleagues from the office of Teaching, Learning, and Assessment. The theme we selected for this year’s conference is teaching as an act of body and brain. Inspired by Nancy Houfek’s philosophy and practice of using theatre techniques to enhance teaching (see the video below), we decided to bring her to DePaul as a keynote speaker to talk about the power of acting or how to induce tears by reading a menu.

As Nancy points out, the techniques used by actors to captivate an audience can very well be borrowed by professors to engage students in the classroom. Yet in our daily practice, we as teachers often focus almost solely on the content and leave the delivery of the content to chance.

Content is critical, but without gaining the attention of your audience, it won’t come across. While the story of menu reading is a bit extreme, it does convey a very strong message: sometimes when it is done extremely well, the presentation can overpower the content! Even if we can’t go that far, it can at least help us capture the attention of our students.

There is a common attribute shared by the profession of acting and the practice of teaching: both require a high dosage of passion. We teach largely because we are in love with it. The difference between us and actors is that they seem to know better how to make that passion visible—through their voice, gestures, and body languages. We teachers, on the other hand, rarely make any conscious choice about the nonverbal messages that we convey, especially when we are in the classroom.

On May 6th, following Nancy’s keynote speech, DePaul Theatre School professor Natalie Turner-Jones will lead a practical workshop exploring theatre-based techniques that can be applied to the classroom environment. She will explain why the way we use the classroom space, gesticulate to make a point, move, breathe, or pause all convey a clear message to our students and how making conscious choices in these areas empowers teachers to create an engaging and playful learning environment.

So, if you haven’t yet, please mark your calendar for May 6th’s DePaul Annual Faculty Conference and registers online at http://teachingcommons.depaul.edu/Conference/registration.html