Theatre Design & Technology - Fall 2022 - 9

University) have brought costume educators
and practitioners together through
the American Theatrical Costume
Association. Through its website, ATCA
(atcacommunity.org)
offers
resources
and connections that are invaluable to all,
but especially to the many costume educators
outside of large cultural hubs, who
often feel isolated from the greater professional
community and the important
conversations happening there.
It may surprise some that costume
educators are the ones leading the way
toward decolonizing college theatre curricula,
but it shouldn't. To quote Chloe
Chapin, " Clothing is the intersection of
all human activity, because it is a physical
manifestation of identity. " This is the
precise attribute of dress that makes the
job of a theatrical costumer what it is:
telling a character's story in cloth, color,
and silhouette and rendering cultural
histories and ideas of shared humanity
in a tangible way. So how do we choose
which part of the globe and which points
on the timeline to showcase in a costume
history course, which is still confined to a
very finite number of hours?
It is difficult to answer this question
without re-examining the purpose of
teaching costume history as part of a
theatre program in the first place. Is the
main goal to provide our students with
a visual shorthand for production purposes?
To give a socio-cultural context
for the visual ideas? Perhaps it is to introduce,
or to reinforce, the point that humans
are full of biases and that our own
creation stories shape much of our view
of what is beautiful, or normal, or acceptable.
Or how about to remove all doubt
that appearances matter and that all human
beings are connected by the desire
to express themselves in what their faces,
hair, and bodies look like? Perhaps it is
all of these things and then some more.
These are lofty goals, and they transcend
any singular course. Pondering how to
even begin to design, or redesign our
teaching of costume history in order to
address them is, of course, the crux of the
challenge.
Most of us are a product of an academic
environment that treated classes
as parcels of content to be handed out to
students throughout their time with us. It
regarded learners as blank slates, empty
vessels to be filled with knowledge. But in
the 21st century, people realistically don't
have to come to a university to get access
to content or knowledge; they have it at
their fingertips, 24/7/365. What they do
need from their education are skills-
ways to access knowledge efficiently, to
analyze it, to critically assess it, and to
practice applying it and then add to it
in the context of their own endeavors.
These are precisely the skills that can be
learned and practiced in a costume history
classroom.
On the next few pages are suggestions
to those who wish to tweak, adapt,
or completely re-tool their courses with
a broad aim that in order to begin the
process of decolonizing our curricula we
must think not only about the content,
but our teaching methods. And, though
I use costume history as a disciplinary
foundation, my hope is that this process
of course design can be adopted by theatre
educators of other specializations as
well.
Education literature on course design
uses the term " idea-based learning. " This
model
implies
that
effective teaching
means a shift away from content-based
pedagogy to skill-based. In other words,
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FALL 2022 | THEATRE DESIGN & TECHNOLOGY | 9
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Theatre Design & Technology - Fall 2022

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