BY MICHAEL A. ZAMPELLI, S.J.
“Innovation” can mean different things to different people. Montás uses the term to describe an activity pertinent to the university (as “a center of research and innovation”) rather than to the college, which he describes as “a center of teaching and self-actualization.” He judges certain well-intentioned innovations at this college level, particularly the “emphasis on skills over content” and the “representation of the cultural backgrounds of a diverse student body,” as potential threats to the integrity and effectiveness of a curriculum that should help students consider the “kind of life they want to live.”
Though I agree with Montás that content and coherence are key to the architecture of a core curriculum, I do not believe that tradition and innovation need always be opposed. I would suggest that the innovations of skills development and diversification are important because they strengthen the faculty’s relationship with students, the ground on which any effective liberal education stands. Gauging the value of certain innovations with respect to longer traditions might involve assessing the degree to which the innovations reflect and construct substantial relationships between faculty and students.
In terms of our work in developing students’ particular skills, despite the hue and cry from many faculty about the need to formulate and publish learning goals and aligned skills for both curricula and individual courses, the process has probably proven beneficial for everyone. In naming specific objectives for courses, faculty are made to think deeply and carefully about what we are doing when we teach—what we are aiming at, what we are hoping for, what we desire for our students. Clarifying those ends, along with the skills necessary for achieving them, helps keep us accountable to our students and demonstrates our considered investment in their educational experience.
Having been apprised of the destination of a course, students receive from their teacher a useful tool by which to reflect on the process of their own learning, encouraging them to locate themselves within a longer journey toward freedom and self-understanding, which after all does require some skills.
When it comes to the innovation of diversification, for several years I have been engaged in the process of “decolonizing” my courses in theater history. This has required me to learn more than I ever thought possible, first, about how my own intellectual life and experiences have been structured and, second, about the many strands of important theater of which I have been totally ignorant or only vaguely aware.
I am committed to innovating in this way not because it is a fad, but because my students have made a claim on me. I have seen how they react when they finally read or see a play by someone who looks like them, whose experience approximates their own, whose struggles and joys oscillate with theirs. Decentering the usually revered dramatis personae and inviting those consigned to the theatre’s wings to “find their light” most certainly troubles the received coherence of theatre’s story; yet, it also provides new ways of understanding how important theatrical works “hang together” and speak to us about what it means to live.
Part of what makes Fordham University’s Theater program so well regarded are efforts by faculty to “decolonize” their course content. For Michael Zampelli, S.J., director of the M.A. program in Philosophy and Society and associate professor of Theatre, such a process of innovation “provides new ways of understanding how important theatrical works ‘hang together’ and speak to us about what it means to live.” Photo courtesy of Fordham University.
More than this, my efforts to remap my own theatrical landscape communicate to the students that I see them and want to provide them with whatever helps in accessing the transformative potential of performance. Do I assign Sophocles to help do this? Of course. But also Luis Alfaro and Cherríe Moraga. Is Ibsen in the syllabus? Yes. But also, Lynn Nottage and Alice Childress. I now assign Sondheim and Lin Manuel Miranda, Lauren Yee, and Qui Nguyen.
Put simply: I don’t believe that innovation must be in conflict with tradition.
And in the end, I don’t think that Montás believes that either. I know that he is mostly concerned that we not evacuate the content of general education because we cannot agree on a common slate of culturally significant texts that invite students to ask important existential questions. Still, debates about content generate fruitful innovation—new ways of seeing and relating texts to our human experience and to the condition of our world.
In my view, the more debate the better, especially if we invite our students into the conversations.
Michael A. Zampelli, S.J., is director of the M.A. program in Philosophy and Society and associate professor of Theatre at Fordham University.
The featured cover photo (above) is courtesy of Alex Knight via Unsplash.