Columbia College Chicago Theatre Department faculty member Kathleen Perkins, coordinator of the Theatre Department’s student skills assessment program and co-coordinator of the Theatre Department’s Acting with International Performance Study BFA program, will speak at the 2016 International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL) conference being held October 12-15 at the LAX Marriott in Los Angeles. Perkins’ presentation on Thursday, October 13 — titled “Running and Chewing Gum at the Same Time: A SOTL Study of Performance Skills Integration in a Foundational Acting Class” — traces the Columbia College Theatre Department’s efforts to integrate voice, movement, and acting skills into the curriculum at an earlier stage of student actor development. Perkins will also serve as a mentor to several other in-progress SOTL projects under discussion at the conference.

Perkins will be staying in Los Angeles through Saturday, October 15, and would love to catch up with Columbia College Theatre alumni in the LA area. Alumni who want to contact Perkins to meet in Los Angeles are encouraged to e-mail her at kperkins@colum.edu.

Earlier this year, Perkins published an article in the 2016 issue of Teaching & Learning Inquiry (Vol. 4, No. 1), the official journal of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning (ISSOTL), titled “Down the SoTL Rabbit Hole: Using a Phenomenological Approach to Parse the Development of Student Actors.”