5. Ecologize your syllabi.

While it may take significant time and coordination to position ecological values at the core of a department’s artistic and pedagogical mission, individual educators can take important steps to ecologize their syllabi and respond responsibly to the climate and nature emergency.

What do we mean by the phrase “ecologize your syllabi”? Ecologizing here means taking into consideration principles of ecological thought and practices of environmental stewardship into each element of syllabus design. Ecologizing here means taking into consideration principles of ecological thought and practices of environmental stewardship into each element of syllabus design. Course rationale, learning objectives, course materials, classroom activities, formal and informal assessment design, evaluation criteria, and administrative policies all offer opportunities for directing student attention towards sustainable practice and more-than-human relations. For instance, a theatre history course might be built around an exploration of how “place and placeness” sits at the centre of discourse for both theatre historiography and environmental stewardship, while an introductory acting course might use the Climate Change Theatre Action anthologies as a primary source text. See Appendix 3 and 4 for more examples.

This is critical work for ensuring the continued relevance of our programs. As Taxopoulou argues, “The current educational system is very much based on the past and the present, whereas the future and the challenges it will bring will have to be addressed through the lens of sustainability. The young people will need to be equipped with knowledge that will not be obsolete at graduation.”^[1] Integrating environmental stewardship into performance pedagogy requires reframing sustainability as an opportunity, not a loss. As ecoscenographer and scholar Tanja Beer suggests, we must redirect our attention from the perceived sacrifices required to meet sustainability requirements, and instead focus on the creative gains and challenges that arise in facing the climate crisis: “the key will be to see our current ecological crisis as a social, cultural, political and environmental opportunity.”^[2]

Ian Garrett offers a compelling example of how a broader systems thinking approach unfolds in his course “Sustainable Staging Techniques”:

I work through a four-stage process of change management within a theatrical context to prepare students to make these choices. This starts with setting agreed values, followed by cultivating systems thinking, aspirational thinking, and change management. Throughout this course, students build literacy in the complexity of sustainability issues, drafting proposals for sustainable changes in our institution, which they present to the administration. Although not a required result, some of these projects have affected real change within the university. But most importantly, students learn how to assess and propose changes to our systems of theatrical production informed by their wider contexts. They become adept at seeing and responding to “wicked problems,” or problems that defy solutions because of their complexity.^[3]

He adds, “[t]he important thing for a student to understand may not be which lumber or luminaire is best, but rather how to interrogate their practice so that their work aligns with what they value.”^[4] Such insight aligns with Taxopoulou’s observation “the main accelerator towards mainstreaming sustainable practice in theatre production would be to cultivate sustainable thinking before, or at least in parallel to, developing and adopting greener practices.”^[5] This kind of critical thinking renders training in theatre and performance courses useful for responding to complex problems in socially and ecologically accountable ways beyond theatre walls.

In our working group’s research into syllabus design, we considered four broad categories of  courses common to theatre and performance post-secondary education programs: acting/directing, production, design, theory/history, playwriting/devising. As part of our teach-in “Re-Imagining the Future,” we held workshops on how to ecologize syllabi relevant to each curricular category. You can access documentation from these workshops on the CATR website and summarized in Appendix 3, and further sample syllabi in Appendix 4. You will find that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel in order to ecologize your syllabi. We encourage you to get in touch with the creators of these materials if you have questions about how to apply this work to classes you are already teaching.