Many thanks to SRN member Romana Turina for inviting me to give an online seminar on the benefits of Flipping Your Classroom for the Working Group on Comparative Screenwriting in the Screenwriting Research Network that she leads.
Every month she presents and records a guest lecture for our membership that is then open to the public once she posts it on YouTube.
This month she asked me to speak about the pedagogy of flipping your classroom to enhance learning which, while created with K-12 students in mind is equally effective – and I would add necessary – in the world of MFA candidates. I use this practice in the teaching of screenwriting in our low residency Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting.
It involves the professor providing less “Sage on the stage” performance and more student-focused opportunities. I’ve also come to describe it as not teaching (as defined by dumping all my info into their heads) but as curating an experience from which they glean the knowledge they need.
In the lecture I give examples of the kinds of activities I curate, keeping in mind the different learning styles each MFA candidate presents.
A military veteran, Herrera also runs the Stephens College Mission Promise Kept program. Together we spoke about the many military women whose stories have yet to be told on the big (or small) screen including the Mercury 13. Herrera was kind enough to let me talk about the Screenwriting Research Network conference we were holding on the Stephens campus that week and, of course, about the many military women who have dome through our Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting and how telling our stories helps us heal – whether we turn them into scripts or not it’s the act of talking and being heard that heals.
She Served Too Every 3rd Tue at 5:00 PM With Elizabeth Herrera
Host Elizabeth Herrera has served in the United States Air Force, non-profits, and managing crisis care centers for women. On her show She Served Too, she discusses current issues from her unique perspective.
Host: I know it’s always so heartening when something turns up that was thought to be lost and there may still be some Treasures out there and people are discovering new things every day and that’s what you know of course of interest to us at the Museum – finding those rare rare voices that luckily were preserved in some way or other and just bringing them to light more.
Rosanne: Well and that’s what I always tell students too. If you go to places like museums you know when my students are in town – they’re low residency but they come in town once twice a year – and we’ll go to The Autry. We’ll go to the Herrick. We’ll go to different places but what – even long before I did this job – I would go to The Autry with my son because of course cowboy stuff cool but also you look at the photographs of who the Cowboys right and we all know they weren’t John Wayne. We all know that wasn’t who it was right? They were the Mexican Americans and they were Chinese Americans and you see that in the photographs but movies came along and made them all Caucasian and that’s ridiculous but that became the myth right? So the more we look at the real history the more we can tell those real stories. I love research.
Host: Me too. Well, thanks so much for joining us it was such a wonderful conversation and I especially I think I’ll take away this idea of a sort of community type stories in westerns particularly from our perspective – what are those western films that feature that Community story and is that a sort of more feminine point of view or a kind of women’s view of the West. That’s going to stick with me but as will many other points thanks so much for joining us.
Rosanne: Thanks for asking me. I love to talk about this clearly and I love The Autry
Museum
Host: Thanks
the archery Museum of the American West thanks our members and supporters
The Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting is building a relationship with the Autry Museum of the American West since both organizations are devoted to bringing out more diverse and untold stories. Last year we were able to take our cohort of graduating MFA candidates to the museum’s theatre for a showing of Michael Wilson’s Salt of the Earth and we had plans to present a film of our choice this year – but of course the pandemic changed all that. Instead, Autry Curator Josh Garrett-Davis asked me if I would sit for an interview about female screenwriters in the western genre and so “When Women Wrote Westerns” came to be a part of their “What Is a Western? Interview Series”.
I had a great time discussing so many wonderful women writers – from Jeanne MacPherson to D.C. Fontana to Edna Ferber to Emily Andras. If you love westerns I suggest you watch Josh’s other interviews covering everything from the work of Native Americans in Western movies to films in the western-horror hybrid. —
What this entire presentation
As part of a series exploring the significance of the Western genre and the ways in which the movies shape our understanding of the American West, Autry Curator Josh Garrett-Davis interviews Professor Rosanne Welch about the women screenwriters of Hollywood and their contributions to the Western genre.
…and women are terrible at keeping track of their own archives. So many of these women threw away material. They cleaned out their houses. They were busy with kids. They didn’t want all this clutter around when their career was over and it disappeared. I mean it’s a great story, Bess Meredyth – who wrote many, many films in the silent era – and then she married Michael Curtiz who is the director of Casablanca and there –as people study Casablanca often – he would be asked the question on the set and had to leave to figure it out and they knew he went home to call his wife to help him figure out the story problem. Then he’d come back and her son wrote a biography of her. He also became a TV writer. Problem was he never thought to ask his mother about her career. When she was older it was like I didn’t imagine she did anything interesting. So even within our own families we don’t talk about the work that we do women particularly and that’s a mistake because then the stories die. So we need you know in the places where we have things like the Library of Congress and all the catalogs of film, we have to start going backward and preserving as much of female work as we can and work by African Americans. We have a lot of early African-American screenwriters where we know they existed because there are advertisements for their movies but the movies don’t exist anymore. So how can we study stuff that we can’t have access to.
The Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting is building a relationship with the Autry Museum of the American West since both organizations are devoted to bringing out more diverse and untold stories. Last year we were able to take our cohort of graduating MFA candidates to the museum’s theatre for a showing of Michael Wilson’s Salt of the Earth and we had plans to present a film of our choice this year – but of course the pandemic changed all that. Instead, Autry Curator Josh Garrett-Davis asked me if I would sit for an interview about female screenwriters in the western genre and so “When Women Wrote Westerns” came to be a part of their “What Is a Western? Interview Series”.
I had a great time discussing so many wonderful women writers – from Jeanne MacPherson to D.C. Fontana to Edna Ferber to Emily Andras. If you love westerns I suggest you watch Josh’s other interviews covering everything from the work of Native Americans in Western movies to films in the western-horror hybrid. —
What this entire presentation
As part of a series exploring the significance of the Western genre and the ways in which the movies shape our understanding of the American West, Autry Curator Josh Garrett-Davis interviews Professor Rosanne Welch about the women screenwriters of Hollywood and their contributions to the Western genre.
Host: So are there some ways that we as – like the work you’ve been doing with your research – that in terms of revising those kind of incomplete histories of the film industry. What steps can we take to actually repair that and have a more accurate Narrative of the past?
Rosanne: Oh wow. Well, of course, hire more women writers. Step one to get more of those stories that – hire more underrepresented voices to tell us the stories we haven’t heard before and once we’ve done that, we have to preserve this material. One of the issues again with why we don’t remember these women is when we started preserving films and doing the Library of Congress and the 100 Years of – all of that stuff – people kind of push the that wasn’t important. It was Charlie Chaplin and these other people and we preserved all their material. We didn’t really think about that when it comes to stuff done by women.
The Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting is building a relationship with the Autry Museum of the American West since both organizations are devoted to bringing out more diverse and untold stories. Last year we were able to take our cohort of graduating MFA candidates to the museum’s theatre for a showing of Michael Wilson’s Salt of the Earth and we had plans to present a film of our choice this year – but of course the pandemic changed all that. Instead, Autry Curator Josh Garrett-Davis asked me if I would sit for an interview about female screenwriters in the western genre and so “When Women Wrote Westerns” came to be a part of their “What Is a Western? Interview Series”.
I had a great time discussing so many wonderful women writers – from Jeanne MacPherson to D.C. Fontana to Edna Ferber to Emily Andras. If you love westerns I suggest you watch Josh’s other interviews covering everything from the work of Native Americans in Western movies to films in the western-horror hybrid. —
What this entire presentation
As part of a series exploring the significance of the Western genre and the ways in which the movies shape our understanding of the American West, Autry Curator Josh Garrett-Davis interviews Professor Rosanne Welch about the women screenwriters of Hollywood and their contributions to the Western genre.
Host: What are the examples of the heroine’s journey? What are some of those the stories that are in the heroine’s journey format template? I’m curious.
Rosanne: Oh I would obviously “The Wizard of Oz” like I said. In a TV world, we claim that for “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” right? Very much so about that. The joke becomes you could say “Scooby-Doo” does that. It’s anything that involves a team coming together and so in a fun way that can also be sometimes a male-focused team. If you think about war movies they’re all about a team of people coming together for the betterment of each other. Even though they’re like the most dude movies and you could say the same thing about westerns. If it’s a group of people an Oregon Trail kind of thing or group of men in a town or the sheriff and a couple of his buddies. The heroine in terms of pulling away from being female and then pulling back into it, that tends to happen more often in sort of romantic comedy or something like “The Intern” where she’s trying to figure out how to be a leader of these other men and then she has to realize it’s about the nurturing that I do. That is better than me being more loud and annoying and stuff but I can make a list for you that I can have.
Host: Okay great. Well, I’ll claim “The Wizard of Oz” and “Buffy” as westerns. I think Sunnyvale – Sunnyvale? Is that – I think that’s in California we can call it
Rosanne: it is. That’s true. It is about making the town safe for the new inhabitants.
Host: Right.
The Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting is building a relationship with the Autry Museum of the American West since both organizations are devoted to bringing out more diverse and untold stories. Last year we were able to take our cohort of graduating MFA candidates to the museum’s theatre for a showing of Michael Wilson’s Salt of the Earth and we had plans to present a film of our choice this year – but of course the pandemic changed all that. Instead, Autry Curator Josh Garrett-Davis asked me if I would sit for an interview about female screenwriters in the western genre and so “When Women Wrote Westerns” came to be a part of their “What Is a Western? Interview Series”.
I had a great time discussing so many wonderful women writers – from Jeanne MacPherson to D.C. Fontana to Edna Ferber to Emily Andras. If you love westerns I suggest you watch Josh’s other interviews covering everything from the work of Native Americans in Western movies to films in the western-horror hybrid. —
What this entire presentation
As part of a series exploring the significance of the Western genre and the ways in which the movies shape our understanding of the American West, Autry Curator Josh Garrett-Davis interviews Professor Rosanne Welch about the women screenwriters of Hollywood and their contributions to the Western genre.
But we’re also looking for news stories and the newer, most interesting ones. They’re gonna break through because the audience is so diverse and so wide and now we’re International right with Netflix and streaming and all that stuff. We can think about people we haven’t covered before and we know around the world other people will be interested in it. In the same way, we’re watching Japanese anime and you know Korean telenovelas and all that stuff.
The Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting is building a relationship with the Autry Museum of the American West since both organizations are devoted to bringing out more diverse and untold stories. Last year we were able to take our cohort of graduating MFA candidates to the museum’s theatre for a showing of Michael Wilson’s Salt of the Earth and we had plans to present a film of our choice this year – but of course the pandemic changed all that. Instead, Autry Curator Josh Garrett-Davis asked me if I would sit for an interview about female screenwriters in the western genre and so “When Women Wrote Westerns” came to be a part of their “What Is a Western? Interview Series”.
I had a great time discussing so many wonderful women writers – from Jeanne MacPherson to D.C. Fontana to Edna Ferber to Emily Andras. If you love westerns I suggest you watch Josh’s other interviews covering everything from the work of Native Americans in Western movies to films in the western-horror hybrid. —
What this entire presentation
As part of a series exploring the significance of the Western genre and the ways in which the movies shape our understanding of the American West, Autry Curator Josh Garrett-Davis interviews Professor Rosanne Welch about the women screenwriters of Hollywood and their contributions to the Western genre.
…and there’s a lot of dudes in town — really good guys — who are learning that wait a minute, we’re used to talking over women and all that sort of thing and we have to stop and let people finish their thoughts before we dive in with something else and then people forget things and then women also have to be good — you know the classic story is that you might pitch an idea and no one takes it up and 15 minutes later a guy pitches it in the writer’s room and then everyone’s like oh yeah let’s go with that. Then you have to say that’s exactly what I said 10 minutes ago and then they’ll all kind of oh yeah. You’re right. You have to claim your talent or other people will gladly walk over it. So I think those are behavioral things right but we don’t want to — we don’t have to be super dude-like to succeed. We just have to be strong and know that you’re good at what you do…and you’ll succeed.
The Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting is building a relationship with the Autry Museum of the American West since both organizations are devoted to bringing out more diverse and untold stories. Last year we were able to take our cohort of graduating MFA candidates to the museum’s theatre for a showing of Michael Wilson’s Salt of the Earth and we had plans to present a film of our choice this year – but of course the pandemic changed all that. Instead, Autry Curator Josh Garrett-Davis asked me if I would sit for an interview about female screenwriters in the western genre and so “When Women Wrote Westerns” came to be a part of their “What Is a Western? Interview Series”.
I had a great time discussing so many wonderful women writers – from Jeanne MacPherson to D.C. Fontana to Edna Ferber to Emily Andras. If you love westerns I suggest you watch Josh’s other interviews covering everything from the work of Native Americans in Western movies to films in the western-horror hybrid. —
What this entire presentation
As part of a series exploring the significance of the Western genre and the ways in which the movies shape our understanding of the American West, Autry Curator Josh Garrett-Davis interviews Professor Rosanne Welch about the women screenwriters of Hollywood and their contributions to the Western genre.
For women particularly though, we know the world is still a boys club and so you have to be confident and you don’t want to be overly aggressive because then people say bad things about you and yet if you’re not, you don’t get through the sort of the clutter of everything. One of the cool things that we teach about is we all know “The Hero’s Journey” – which is what I talked about with Luke Skywalker – but “The Heroine’s Journey” is a thing that we teach right and Maureen Murdoch came up with that. “The Heroine’s Journey”, of course, is about a female character but it’s about what women learn from society which is generally if you want to succeed you have to act like a man. So you separate – your beginning of that movie – you separate from your girlishness and you start doing dude stuff and by the time you’re done with the movie you figure it out, no the only way to actually get forward is to use the talents that I have, perhaps inherently, because I’m a female and when I reconnect to how female I am then I succeed. So to me, that’s what women have to remember to do.
The Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting is building a relationship with the Autry Museum of the American West since both organizations are devoted to bringing out more diverse and untold stories. Last year we were able to take our cohort of graduating MFA candidates to the museum’s theatre for a showing of Michael Wilson’s Salt of the Earth and we had plans to present a film of our choice this year – but of course the pandemic changed all that. Instead, Autry Curator Josh Garrett-Davis asked me if I would sit for an interview about female screenwriters in the western genre and so “When Women Wrote Westerns” came to be a part of their “What Is a Western? Interview Series”.
I had a great time discussing so many wonderful women writers – from Jeanne MacPherson to D.C. Fontana to Edna Ferber to Emily Andras. If you love westerns I suggest you watch Josh’s other interviews covering everything from the work of Native Americans in Western movies to films in the western-horror hybrid. —
What this entire presentation
As part of a series exploring the significance of the Western genre and the ways in which the movies shape our understanding of the American West, Autry Curator Josh Garrett-Davis interviews Professor Rosanne Welch about the women screenwriters of Hollywood and their contributions to the Western genre.
Host: You’ve mentioned being a professor of aspiring screenwriters. You know as they look to their future careers. What opportunities do you see or challenges that they, and maybe particularly your women students, will face but probably also your men students? What looks like it may be changing? What challenges are they facing what you know how are our Technologies changing that may affect this? What do you see looking forward?
Rosanne: So many things. I think what’s a good thing to look forward to is the studios are now recognizing thanks to “Wonder Woman” and “Black Panther” there are audiences for stories that are not from the main quote-unquote norm. So now they’re hungry for those because they want that money and it’s always about money. We always know that. It is a business about money. The art is secondary which is a bummer but people are beginning to look for them but they’re still hesitant. They’re still a little worried. So you’ve got to really be confident and you’ve got to be really well-researched on whatever the story is that you want to tell, also demographically. You really have to think about who is this audience. You want some proof about where they are and all that stuff and a lot of writers are learning to you have to do you know it’s show business. You have to do half business, half show and you know we like to avoid the business but if you want to get someone to do a new kind of story you have to do that.
The Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting is building a relationship with the Autry Museum of the American West since both organizations are devoted to bringing out more diverse and untold stories. Last year we were able to take our cohort of graduating MFA candidates to the museum’s theatre for a showing of Michael Wilson’s Salt of the Earth and we had plans to present a film of our choice this year – but of course the pandemic changed all that. Instead, Autry Curator Josh Garrett-Davis asked me if I would sit for an interview about female screenwriters in the western genre and so “When Women Wrote Westerns” came to be a part of their “What Is a Western? Interview Series”.
I had a great time discussing so many wonderful women writers – from Jeanne MacPherson to D.C. Fontana to Edna Ferber to Emily Andras. If you love westerns I suggest you watch Josh’s other interviews covering everything from the work of Native Americans in Western movies to films in the western-horror hybrid. —
What this entire presentation
As part of a series exploring the significance of the Western genre and the ways in which the movies shape our understanding of the American West, Autry Curator Josh Garrett-Davis interviews Professor Rosanne Welch about the women screenwriters of Hollywood and their contributions to the Western genre.
![Flipping Your Classroom with Dr. Rosanne Welch – Screenwriting Research Network Working Group on Comparative Screenwriting [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/srn-flipped-2024-1.jpg)
![Flipping Your Classroom with Dr. Rosanne Welch - Screenwriting Research Network Working Group on Comparative Screenwriting [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/srn-flipped-2024.jpg)
![Dr. Rosanne Welch Interview - She Served Too, KPON FM, Columbia, MIssouri [Audio]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/rmw-kopn-interview.gif)
While I was on the Stephens College campus a couple of weeks ago for the ![14 Conclusion from What Is a Western? Interview Series: When Women Wrote Westerns from the Autry Museum of the American West [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/what-is-a-western-24.jpg)
![23 The Importance of Archives from What Is a Western? Interview Series: When Women Wrote Westerns from the Autry Museum of the American West [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/what-is-a-western-23.jpg)
![22 Preserving Women's Film History from What Is a Western? Interview Series: When Women Wrote Westerns from the Autry Museum of the American West [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/what-is-a-western-22.jpg)
![21 Examples of the Heroine's Journey from What Is a Western? Interview Series: When Women Wrote Westerns from the Autry Museum of the American West [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/what-is-a-western-21.jpg)
![20 Diversity in the Room from What Is a Western? Interview Series: When Women Wrote Westerns from the Autry Museum of the American West [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/what-is-a-western-20.jpg)
![19 Claim Your Space in the Room from What Is a Western? Interview Series: When Women Wrote Westerns from the Autry Museum of the American West [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/what-is-a-western-19.jpg)
![18 The Heroine's Journey from What Is a Western? Interview Series: When Women Wrote Westerns from the Autry Museum of the American West [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/what-is-a-western-18.jpg)
![17 Opportunities and Challenges from What Is a Western? Interview Series: When Women Wrote Westerns from the Autry Museum of the American West [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/what-is-a-western-17.jpg)