"Now everyone after me . . . zaya-zaya-zaya-zaya . . . awuzza-wuzza-wuzza-wuzza . . . bobbly-bobbly-bobbly-bobbly." No, this is no ordinary Harvard class. Nancy Houfek is teaching Harvard's teachers. Looking around her audience, she laughs, "But if only it were so easy!"

Nancy Houfek, head of voice and speech at the American Repertory Theatre, leads a Bok Center workshop on how to incorporate acting techniques in teaching. Photo by Kris Snibbe.

On March 3, 10, and 17, Houfek, the head of voice and speech at the American Repertory Theatre, led a three-part workshop titled "Teaching as Performance: The Storyteller's Art." The workshop was part of the Lecturing and Speaking in Public Series, offered this month by Harvard's Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning.

Houfek began the workshop by asking the audience of faculty and teaching fellows to name a few charismatic storytellers. She volunteered radio personality and author Garrison Keillor and comedian Jackie Mason as two of her favorites. In just a few minutes, the blackboard was covered with names, including a few from Harvard: Diana Eck, Thomas Kelly, Mark Kishlansky, and Robert Levin. "All of these people lift potentially dry concepts -- printed words on the page -- and bring them to life through voice, gesture, action. You can do it, too," she promised.

Houfek's objective was to help her audience access certain performance qualities that make great teachers. Throughout the workshops, she used theater as a metaphor for teaching, and suggested that teachers already inherently make use of stage, costume, lighting, and props.

In keeping with her metaphor, Houfek encouraged her audience to participate as actors, regardless of how silly an exercise may have seemed. She asked them to raise their hands to the ceiling, as if they were casting a spell. "We can conceive that we all have lines of radiating energy. As you stretch your arm, try to feel the energy coming out of your fingertips and out toward the ceiling. How does that feel?" she asked. "Now without moving your arms, I want you to stop that energy right at your fingertips. How does that feel? Did your arm get heavier? Did your breath become shallower?"

Using physical movements and stretches, Houfek tried to make her audience more conscious of their bodies. During the first week, she demonstrated how the most effective performers use their five lines of energy: through the heads, hands, and feet. "I want your body to be your brain," was her frequent mantra.

"Theater is one of the few places where you have permission to use not just your mind, but also your body to communicate," Houfek said. "I think teaching is like that, too." Rather than treating the symptoms of ineffective teaching -- stiffness, hand twitching, feeble voice, lack of eye contact, slouching, or inarticulate speech -- Houfek tried to impart positive qualities of performance to teaching -- energy and charisma, relaxation and focus."

During the second week, she addressed issues of breath and gesture. "When speakers get up in front of groups, they receive all this energy coming at them, and their natural instinct is to block or run. I would like you to redirect that energy, to take a deep breath, draw it in, and send it back out in your speech."

Houfek herself was often an exemplar. Although she was soft- spoken and subdued before she began to lead her workshops, she immediately became animated when she started to teach in front of the group.

"Yes, I try to embody what I teach," she said, "but as someone who's been a performer for 20 years, I'm not really aware of it anymore." The challenge, for her, was breaking it down, and isolating the fundamental elements that make a great performer. "There's a line that I'll always remember. I try to get my students to go from unconscious incompetence, to conscious incompetence, to conscious competence, to unconscious competence."

In the third and final session, Houfek reminded her teachers to take more pleasure in their words. "I like to view all language as onomatopoetic, pleasurable in the mouth," she said. She found words in every field that could be relished and -- with the right timing -- transformed into a form of intentional gesture. "The word 'kan- ga-roo' imitates the hop of a kangaroo," she said.

Pointing out the range of pitch, rate, and volume that is possible for the human voice, Houfek asked the group to make creative use of their texts. "I really believe that a good storyteller can create landscapes and characters out of the most abstract concepts," she said.

Houfek condensed aspects of the two-year voice and speech curriculum that she teaches as part of the graduate-level program for the American Repertory Theatre's Institute for Advanced Theater Training into the three afternoon sessions of "Teaching as Performance." Although this, of course, was an impossible task, the workshop series was a remarkable experience for all its participants. Houfek, who has coached actors, television personalities, and now, teachers, brought two decades of stage and teaching experience to each session.

Lee Warren, associate director of the Bok Center, invited Houfek to the Bok Center after seeing her speak at the American Repertory Theatre two years ago. Warren recognized that what Houfek was teaching actors was equally relevant for teachers.

Since then, Houfek has given more than half a dozen workshops for the Bok Center, which provides comprehensive training to Harvard teachers at fall and spring orientations, and also offers personal consultations, videotaping of classes, support for foreign faculty and teaching fellows, classroom observation, and miscellaneous workshops throughout the academic year.

To see a video of this year's workshop series, "Teaching as Performance," call the Bok Center or visit its Website at http://www.fas.harvard.ed u/~bok_cen/.