Major & Minor Changes for Departmental and Arts Students on the Horizon

The Department of Drama and Speech Communication is happy to announce that by September 2015 all three departmental units will have new curricular initiatives launched. These changes foster our commitment to cross-unit collaboration in teaching and research. They also invite students to actively consider undertaking a double major – in Speech Communication and Drama – with a Digital Arts Communication (DAC) minor. And they allow students in all Arts programs to consider a DAC minor.

Here are the highlights:

Speech Communication: launched officially in Sept 2014, the earliest of the three initiatives, Speech Communication has integrated four formerly separate areas of concentration – Interpersonal, Intercultural and Organizational, Public and Digital, and Performance. Students now have greater flexibility to design their own unique path of study in the program. They also now have access to required courses in all four areas to give them both greater breadth and opportunity to work with a variety of communication practices and to reflect with robust theory.

Actor in hospital gown sitting in wheelchair

Theatre and Performance: launches officially in September 2015 with a new name, Theatre and Performance. This name change reflects a major overhaul in its curriculum as well. These changes allow Theatre and Performance to articulate the program’s unique strengths in theatre and performance creation, critical performance studies, and theatre and technology; strengthen new and important disciplinary areas especially design, language, gender, and race studies; and balance and integrate theory and practice at all levels of the curriculum.

Man speaking with Powerpoint slides Digital Arts Communication (DAC): no longer an Arts and Business Specialization, DAC officially joins the Department in September 2015 as a departmental minor program, and will be available to all students in Arts. As a minor, DAC expands from a six to eight course offering, with new, complementary courses from departments across the Faculty.

Acting Chair, Andy Houston, is excited about the pan-department changes:

We’re excited about the ways our curricular changes help students work across disciplines in our programs and in other departments; increasingly we are working with students eager to address urgent problems in our world, and so we have developed curricula that offer knowledge and skills to address these problems from a variety of ways. These changes reflect our hands-on teaching philosophy, where students are creators in project-based, experiential learning.