Wilma Reyes is the most recent recipient of the Janet Warner – Eric Rump Travel Award. An alumna of the Glendon Campus, Reyes recently completed her Bachelor of Arts in English with a minor in psychology. She is now pursuing a Bachelor of Education at the Keele Campus. The Travel Award funded Reyes’s summer trip to London, England, to conduct research on Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre.
The primary goal of Reyes’s trip to the Globe Theatre was to take photos and videos of the space to create an educational resource for her future classroom. As an avid reader and English enthusiast, Reyes has always had an interest in Shakespeare. However, she cites an early experience as an eighth-grade student as the catalyst for this research project. As a young student, she was asked to envision and draw what she thought the Globe Theatre looked like (without seeing photos!) as a tool for starting a discussion on the reality of the theatre during Shakespeare’s time. Reyes notes her fascination with the Globe Theatre’s circular shape.
This experience inspired her to want to create a complementary educational resource for this exercise. In Reyes’s future classroom, after students draw their imagined Globe Theatre, she will use the multimedia resource she creates with her photos and videos from her research trip to help students conceptualize what the theatre would have looked like to Shakespeare’s contemporaries and what it looks like now. Reyes speaks energetically about her trip and her tour of the Globe noting that the wealthy patrons sat behind the stage to be seen by the other audience members. Reyes’s students are sure to benefit from her first-hand experience and the stories she has to tell.
Reyes also visited Switzerland during her trip abroad.
Reyes is dedicated to the material at hand – and wants to share that passion with her students. Her research project was inspired not only by her educational experience, but also by her teaching experience: she notes how many students are often distracted by technology in the classroom and do not always have an inherent interest in studying English, but how using technology strategically will allow her to truly engage with her students. She hopes that her resource will get students excited about the study of English – and to think about the field beyond the written word. She is currently developing the resource and will be piloting her project in her classroom this fall as a student teacher with the Toronto Catholic District School Board.
The Janet Warner – Eric Rump Travel Award is valued at $2000 and was established to honour the memory of Glendon colleagues, Blake Scholar and novelist, Janet Warner, and specialist in 18th-century drama, Eric Rump, both great travellers, who felt travel was enriching. The purpose of the award is to aid a Glendon student who wishes to travel somewhere outside of Toronto with an academic aim in mind.