Professor Dwight Watson recalls the day Dean of the College Paul McKinney ’52 told him he had earned tenure. The director, playwright, and teacher appreciated the news but was distracted by a couple of student comments in his portfolio.
“I wasn’t sure I had communicated well to them,” says Watson. “You’re always trying to figure out how to better meet the needs of students.”
When he mentioned his concerns to McKinney, the chemistry professor offered surprising advice.
“Paul said, ‘You should teach like you direct.’ That has stayed with me all these years,” Watson says. “It allows me to think more completely about my work as a teacher. These divisions we have between the classroom and the stage or the classroom and immersion learning are just manufactured walls. It all flows together in a way.”
Watson’s 34 years as a teacher at Wabash all came together in April when he was honored with the McLain- McTurnan-Arnold Award for Excellence in Teaching.
“The author of nine books and plays with creative work appearing in seven different anthologies, Watson has received playwriting awards in more than a dozen different competitions. He has taken our students on immersion trips across this country and across the world and has traveled to China to teach theater courses,” Dean of the College Scott Feller said in announcing the honor at Awards Chapel. “Dwight has established himself as a professor with an exceptional capacity for productive scholarship, for exceptional creativity in the arts, and most importantly, as an outstanding teacher of Wabash men.”
That teaching combines the best of theater and pedagogy.
“In the theater we try to make good use of all the minutes we have in our rehearsal time,” Watson says. “Similarly, I try to shape the classroom in a way that has a dramatic arc; that leads to some kind of enlightenment. I do see similarities between the theater and the classroom. It’s a remarkable gift to be able to see education from those various viewpoints, and theater, my lab, allows us to do that kind of investigation.”
Even during his undergraduate days, Watson was drawn to teaching.
“I was attracted to the whole concept of college and the ideas that are being tossed about,” Watson says. “I had that desire to teach. As I developed a greater knowledge and experience in theater, I began to think, Well, I could probably do what this director and teacher is doing.”
It’s a thought he encourages in his own students.
“Sometimes I even tease them and say that I really expect them to get to the place where we can topple that professor-student notion. I want them to call me Dwight. I want to be re-spected, but I want students to get to the point where they are comfortable having more thorough conversations with people about theater. When they get to that place where they exert their talents and their purpose in it all and I see that strength come out, I just want to get out of their way and let them do it, make room for them.
“I love it when we reach the place where we are on a first-name basis.”
Many of those names decorate his office walls on the posters from the more than 40 plays he has directed at Wabash.
“I try to make sure all their names are on the posters whenever possible, because they mean so much. We start with uncertainties and only slight familiarity with one another, yet by the end a real bond is created—a trust that allows them to be expressive and creative.
“I think that is a remarkable thing—to be allowed into a classroom or theater space that encourages that kind of growth. I’ve been blessed with meeting many fine young men and working with those students. It’s difficult in some ways to see them leave, but you know that they are still in conversation with us somewhere.” —Richard Paige, Steve Charles
Congratulate Professor Watson: watsond@wabash.edu