Pierre Hecker is an associate professor in Carleton College’s English department. He became involved with the Center for Community and Civic Engagement when he began offering ACE courses in 2017. Though he was initially dubious, Pierre credits his involvement with the office to Adrienne Falcon, the previous Director of Academic Civic Engagement, who built the ACE program from the ground up. “She was the one who showed me the different kinds of things professors and courses can do when it comes to civic engagement,” he explains.
Pierre’s hesitance as an English professor, and specifically one whose research involves 17th century performance history and texts, is quite understandable: professors cannot simply graft general civic engagement onto an established course. For this reason, he examined the two approaches to engagement, applied and theoretical, and adopted the appropriate method for the content of two of his courses. The 2017 ACE course Merchant of Venice: A Project used the applied civic engagement approach, as the class focused on experiential learning. In addition to examining the literary and historical context of The Merchant of Venice, Carleton students worked with Northfield High School’s Latinx and Friends Play Festival on theater related activities.
This year, his freshman Argument and Inquiry seminar, Drama, Film, and Society, took a more theoretical direction, by looking at the intersections between current societal issues and the ways those manifest in performance. The civic engagement component, Pierre says, involves, “thinking about not just the artistic content of the media we are seeing but the theatrical context. Which is to say, the theater company, what their mission is, what their role in their community is, and what our responsibility is as an audience.”
Through the examination of these different components, students can begin to think more broadly about not only the art on stage but also all the tangential elements. While this introduces them to new paradigms of thinking, it also establishes a groundwork for broaching problems that arise around civic engagement. The A&I class recently attended an intense piece of theater in the Twin Cities, that explored African American generational trauma at Mixed Blood Theater whose mission is to make art entirely accessible—whether through offering free tickets, wheelchair accessibility, or supertitles for those with hearing difficulties. A talk-back followed the performance, with representatives from the Tubman Organization who spoke about the support they provide for those who have had traumatic experiences.
Pierre addressed the consequence of viewing this combination of work in relation to a single play, “Students rethink fundamentally who theater is for and what theater is meant to be doing, and that strikes me as a very valuable thing.” When asked to reflect on the impact ACE has had on his own work, Pierre notes that it has reshaped his views on teaching and which issues are worth scrutinizing during Carleton’s short trimesters. In terms of the affect academic civic engagement has on his students, he frames his hopes in broader terms: “I want them to not be complacent in their thinking about their place in the world.”