Revivify Your Syllabi

To those invested in validating the heterogeneity of ideas and bodies that make up the social fabric we refer to as “The United States,” it is clear that it is not healthy to return to school-as-usual in the University following the brutality wrought by COVID, ongoing racial injustice, and rampant institutional exclusion. Eurocentric syllabi no longer cut it. The banking model of education serves nobody and perpetuates an inequitable power dynamic in the classroom. Buzzwords like “diversity” and “inclusion” often mask the inertia of critical thought at the administrative level. Teachers seeking to really teach benefit from revamping their classes on a regular basis in order to serve and nurture the plurality of thought alive in their student body.

At the same time, professors face a difficult challenge in overhauling curricula, a challenge that comes from a lack of institutional support, scarce time and scant financial resources, and perhaps also a gap in knowledge that makes it nearly impossible to rethink course content. This latter issue also leads to feelings of defensiveness and self-doubt, which, in turn, feed the inertia that stultifies change in the classroom. At the very least, teachers need help to revivify syllabi in such a way as to match the electrical current of our social landscape. I am here to help.

I use the phrase “revivify your syllabi” because the phrase “decolonize the syllabus” doesn’t cut it any more. The task, as interdisciplinary scholar Nayantara Sheoran Appleton, Ph.D. helps us understand, is manifold:

• Diversify your syllabus and curriculum

• Digress from the canon

• Decentre knowledge and knowledge production

• Devalue hierarchies

• Disinvest from citational power structures

• Diminish some voices and opinions in meetings, while magnifying others

Courses that make no attempt to do this are lifeless, insofar as they contribute little to nothing to the waking consciousness of the moment. Moreover, teachers, and especially White teachers, have a social responsibility to actively interrogate their own position in the classroom. This requirement leads to a reconfiguration of power structures in the classroom and opens up the possibility that the shape of a syllabus changes spontaneously based on student input and one’s own realizations gleaned through the performance of teaching. We are, in other words, facing a whole new performance philosophy in academia, one I believe we should embrace.

The what, how, and how much

Given my background and areas of expertise, I am especially comfortable helping teachers in the following areas. However, if you teach in another discipline in the Arts & Humanities, please reach out to see if I can support your work:

• Theatre and Performance Studies

• Dance Studies

• Philosophy

• English (Literature and Poetry)

• Art History

• History and Historiography

• Academic Research and Writing

• Mental Health Counseling

I will use my skills as a teacher, public speaker, mental health counselor, grief worker, and creative intellectual to help with any and all of the following:

• Revamp syllabi for required courses

• Provide suggestions for how to frame the class and position yourself as a facilitator and guide

• Ask tough questions to help check your privilege in the classroom

• Design assignments that emphasize the creation of knowledge instead of regurgitation of acquired information

• Digest mid-semester feedback to recalibrate and realign the trajectory of the course. This means being available throughout your semester for brainstorming and assessment.

• Generate supplemental “student feedback” questions to accompany the templated responses requested by your department, college, or university

• Draft end-of-semester questions for you to reflect on your experience. These reflections will, in turn, help you to generate a potential conference paper or publication or to assist you in inter-departmental dialogue.

Choose from one of two packages:

Package 1

• A complete assessment of the existing syllabus and clear suggestions for where to intervene

• Step-by-step assistance in choosing new readings, lecture-topics, and homework assignments

• Analysis of the embodied dimension of teaching and suggestions for how to remain vulnerable while teaching difficult material

• Language to consider while positioning yourself ideologically within the material you are teaching

Package 2

• Everything included in Package 1

• We’ll enter into the work with the intention of shaping the experience into writing that is suitable for either presentation at a conference or publication in a journal dedicated to pedagogy (Check out my work as co-editor of the Performance Philosophy Book Series and online journal.)

Cost:

There are three prices listed here. The first is for departments who have allotted funds for the hire of outside consultants. The second is for individual faculty members undertaking this important work without the financial assistance of his/her/their department. The third is for adjunct instructors and graduate students. Each Package includes consultation on one syllabus. After we’ve worked together on this syllabus, we can think ahead to other syllabi and agree on a price going forward.

Cost Breakdown: University Funds Available/Faculty Payment/Adjunct Instructor or Grad Student Payment

• Package 1: $250/$175/$100

• Package 2: $400/$300/$150

Why Me? About Will

As a white, cisgendered, heterosexual, able-bodied male, I have had to do a lot of soul-searching and cognitive reconfiguring to confront my internal biases and the inherited racism that comes from inhabiting the subject position of American Whiteness. The university classroom space became a high-stakes training ground in which to broaden my social awareness, to explore how I can act as an ally to and advocate for my students, and to develop the pedagogical skills necessary to design and teach inclusive courses. I have also designed online courses to help myself and others understand the ideologies underpinning racism (see Race & Philosophy). I am now in a position to assist university professors in this necessary work, and I am excited to serve in this capacity.

I am currently a grief worker in Asheville, NC, an editor for Performance Philosophy, a Certified Alcohol and Drug Counselor (CADC-R) and a student in training to become a clinical mental health counselor. Combined with my PhD in Theatre History, I am therefore able to assess education as (1) a cultural process loaded with individual societal grief, (2) a deeply transformative process that could lead to anxiety and depression, and (3) a potentially emancipatory process that frees one’s individual mind and contributes to the betterment of society.

I’ve been deconstructing and reinventing courses since I was a graduate student. Read about my first experience in this paper, co-authored with Megan Lewis Ph.D., that addresses the pedagogical ripple effect of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti: “Hyperlinking and Hyperthinking through Theatre History: Haiti, "Hotel California," Woyzeck, Hegel, and Back Again.”

Check out another pedagogical experiment undertaken with my wife, Joanne Zerdy Ph.D., and former students from the University of Minnesota: “Bootleg Education:Para-Pedagogical Experimentation Outside the University Setting”

Compare two of my own Theatre History syllabi, one from 2012 and another from 2016, to see how I’ve adapted my own curricula:

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