International Journal of Education & the Arts

Citation: Petefish-Schrag, A. (2024). Puppetry for a plague year: A syllabus? International Journal of Education & the Arts, 25(si2.5). http://doi.org/10.26209/ijea25si2.5

At its core, puppetry lives at the edge of impossibility, teeming with contradictions: puppets are simultaneously alive and dead, old and new, art and science, tangible and imagined. So how does one effectively teach a nearly impossible craft when paired with equally impossible conditions of teaching and learning within a pandemic and its many reverberations? In this case study, a puppetry instructor considers the question of teaching “impossibility” through the lens of a puppetry design and performance course taught at Iowa State University in the Fall semester of 2021. In doing so, she examines the learning context, curricular structures, and pedagogies applied in the course. This includes discussion of the instructor’s efforts to develop a more responsive and flexible instructional framework that coupled the inherent incongruities of the puppetry craft with students’ lived experiences within the pandemic.