In my doctoral studies, I found my interdisciplinary coursework to be perhaps the most informative and enjoyable of my educational experiences. Except for the occasional elective, most students tend to focus their educational paths on our major field of study, which is understandable given the relative brevity of degree programs. There is, however, significant benefit to venturing outside of our comfort zones and expanding our experiential repertoire. I was somewhat aware of the links between music and visual art, but theatre was far outside my realm of experience or affinity. Once I was given the opportunity to study this subject, though, and even more to experience theatrical performances as both a participant and an observer, I developed a much deeper understanding and was then able to see the connections between my chosen visual art form and performance-based arts. I’d never been much of a fan of live theatre prior to these courses, but I have to admit that my horizons were vastly expanded by exposure to interdisciplinary instruction in this art form.
Visual art, music, and theatre all share the distinction of being among the Fine Arts and typically share space in a department or college within the larger university. Ongoing research has shown that expanding the idea of interdisciplinary to merge even more dissimilar subjects, especially incorporating the Arts into Science, Engineering, Mathematics, and Technology—turning STEM into STEAM—can provide amazing benefits to students. Students in the STEM disciplines tend towards being left-brained thinkers, proficient in logic, reasoning, language, and analysis. Students of the arts, on the other hand, tend to be strong right-brained thinkers, with strong creative, intuitive, imaginative, and visual/auditory capabilities. When students are provided the opportunity to experience true interdisciplinary coursework, bringing together both kinds of thinkers in collaboration on a project that incorporates both imagination and reason, insight and logic, language and non-verbal communication, it can produce simply amazing results.
I propose that similar benefits would also be found when combining Humanities with the Arts. With this in mind, I propose a sample interdisciplinary course in which students from Mass Communications/Journalism and Theatre would collaborate to produce a present-day edition of the Living Newspaper. By way of a brief historical explanation, The Living Newspaper is a theatrical genre created under the auspices of the Federal Theatre Project, a division of the Roosevelt Administration’s Works Progress Administration. In an age before cable news or the Internet, theatre companies produced non-fictional plays about current events such as the housing crisis, rural electrification, or farm subsidies—crucial subjects during the Great Depression. These plays were performed across the country, both as a means of providing meaningful work for thousands of actors, playwrights, directors and other theatre professionals and as a way of providing important news content for American audiences, specifically to utilize the power of the arts to increase public awareness of social issues. Project director Hallie Flanagan organized the offices of the Living Newspaper along the lines of a major metropolitan newspaper office, with an editor-in-chief, city editors, reporters, and copyreaders. Researchers and dramatists collaborated on projects, producing plays of unprecedented creativity and vibrancy.
In this course students would spend the first six weeks of the semester engaged in a combination of lecture, reading, and experiential learning in the historical basis of the Living Newspaper, present-day print and broadcast journalism, and theatre production. The next six weeks would be devoted to weekly skits in which students would collaboratively identify and research a relevant news story and then divide into four task groups: scriptwriting/directing, staging (set, costumes, props), tech (sound, light, multimedia), and acting, concluding the week with the performance of the skit. These task groups would be formed heterogeneously, including students from all disciplines and would rotate on a weekly basis in order to provide students with at least one opportunity to experience the different aspects of performance. The course would culminate with an evening of One-Act plays, developed from the four most successful of the weekly skits.
This course has three primary objectives: 1) Expand students’ knowledge of the human condition through the combination of journalism and theatre. 2) Enhance students’ creative and communicative capacities through production and performance of live theatrical experiences. 3) Empower students in their ability to construct, present, and defend critical and aesthetic judgments of journalistic and theatrical texts/performances. Assessment would be weighted towards class participation, with additional grades given for written assignments occurring throughout the course.
Of course, this is just one example of numerous possible pairings of seeming disparate subjects. My current project is the development of a course combining music and mathematics (specifically, geometry), but an almost unlimited number of opportunities exist in which there might be mutually beneficial combinations of two or more disciplines. Further study and curriculum development are clearly necessary before these innovations can be implemented as actual course offerings. It would also require the participation of adventurous and visionary faculty members who are willing to take on the challenge of stepping outside of their own comfort zones and piloting this groundbreaking educational endeavor.
With all due modesty, I’d like to point out that innovative curriculum design requires a combination of left-brained and right-brained thinking, just as these proposed interdisciplinary courses would also engage both aspects of students’ thinking processes. Of course (barring serious illness or injury) all of us think with both sides of our brains. We do, however, tend to be more dominant in one hemisphere or the other, with the left-brain being the focus of far more courses in higher education. Indeed, but for the College of Visual and Performing Arts, few departments utilize right-brain thinking extensively. Universities that have begun offering such courses, like the University of Michigan and its Smart Surfaces course are making great strides towards greater interdisciplinarity, merging heuristic and logical thinking. It is my fervent hope that this movement will spread to more institutions of higher learning, affording all students the opportunities that can be found by engaging in coursework that develop both sides of their brains.
Visual art, music, and theatre all share the distinction of being among the Fine Arts and typically share space in a department or college within the larger university. Ongoing research has shown that expanding the idea of interdisciplinary to merge even more dissimilar subjects, especially incorporating the Arts into Science, Engineering, Mathematics, and Technology—turning STEM into STEAM—can provide amazing benefits to students. Students in the STEM disciplines tend towards being left-brained thinkers, proficient in logic, reasoning, language, and analysis. Students of the arts, on the other hand, tend to be strong right-brained thinkers, with strong creative, intuitive, imaginative, and visual/auditory capabilities. When students are provided the opportunity to experience true interdisciplinary coursework, bringing together both kinds of thinkers in collaboration on a project that incorporates both imagination and reason, insight and logic, language and non-verbal communication, it can produce simply amazing results.
I propose that similar benefits would also be found when combining Humanities with the Arts. With this in mind, I propose a sample interdisciplinary course in which students from Mass Communications/Journalism and Theatre would collaborate to produce a present-day edition of the Living Newspaper. By way of a brief historical explanation, The Living Newspaper is a theatrical genre created under the auspices of the Federal Theatre Project, a division of the Roosevelt Administration’s Works Progress Administration. In an age before cable news or the Internet, theatre companies produced non-fictional plays about current events such as the housing crisis, rural electrification, or farm subsidies—crucial subjects during the Great Depression. These plays were performed across the country, both as a means of providing meaningful work for thousands of actors, playwrights, directors and other theatre professionals and as a way of providing important news content for American audiences, specifically to utilize the power of the arts to increase public awareness of social issues. Project director Hallie Flanagan organized the offices of the Living Newspaper along the lines of a major metropolitan newspaper office, with an editor-in-chief, city editors, reporters, and copyreaders. Researchers and dramatists collaborated on projects, producing plays of unprecedented creativity and vibrancy.
In this course students would spend the first six weeks of the semester engaged in a combination of lecture, reading, and experiential learning in the historical basis of the Living Newspaper, present-day print and broadcast journalism, and theatre production. The next six weeks would be devoted to weekly skits in which students would collaboratively identify and research a relevant news story and then divide into four task groups: scriptwriting/directing, staging (set, costumes, props), tech (sound, light, multimedia), and acting, concluding the week with the performance of the skit. These task groups would be formed heterogeneously, including students from all disciplines and would rotate on a weekly basis in order to provide students with at least one opportunity to experience the different aspects of performance. The course would culminate with an evening of One-Act plays, developed from the four most successful of the weekly skits.
This course has three primary objectives: 1) Expand students’ knowledge of the human condition through the combination of journalism and theatre. 2) Enhance students’ creative and communicative capacities through production and performance of live theatrical experiences. 3) Empower students in their ability to construct, present, and defend critical and aesthetic judgments of journalistic and theatrical texts/performances. Assessment would be weighted towards class participation, with additional grades given for written assignments occurring throughout the course.
Of course, this is just one example of numerous possible pairings of seeming disparate subjects. My current project is the development of a course combining music and mathematics (specifically, geometry), but an almost unlimited number of opportunities exist in which there might be mutually beneficial combinations of two or more disciplines. Further study and curriculum development are clearly necessary before these innovations can be implemented as actual course offerings. It would also require the participation of adventurous and visionary faculty members who are willing to take on the challenge of stepping outside of their own comfort zones and piloting this groundbreaking educational endeavor.
With all due modesty, I’d like to point out that innovative curriculum design requires a combination of left-brained and right-brained thinking, just as these proposed interdisciplinary courses would also engage both aspects of students’ thinking processes. Of course (barring serious illness or injury) all of us think with both sides of our brains. We do, however, tend to be more dominant in one hemisphere or the other, with the left-brain being the focus of far more courses in higher education. Indeed, but for the College of Visual and Performing Arts, few departments utilize right-brain thinking extensively. Universities that have begun offering such courses, like the University of Michigan and its Smart Surfaces course are making great strides towards greater interdisciplinarity, merging heuristic and logical thinking. It is my fervent hope that this movement will spread to more institutions of higher learning, affording all students the opportunities that can be found by engaging in coursework that develop both sides of their brains.