Faculty Empowerment
Academic Year:
2021 - 2022 (June 1, 2021 through May 31, 2022)
Funding Requested:
$10,000.00
Project Dates:
-
Applicant(s):
Overview of the Project:
Faculty Empowerment, created and facilitated by Michael Thornhill and Karen Olivo, is a series of workshops designed to investigate the ways in which tradition, culture, race, identity, and trauma inform artistic training. Through listening sessions and in person workshops, faculty develop applicable tools to build culturally inclusive pedagogies, equity forward teaching strategies, and community building structures to dismantle and innovate training for today’s young artist. Faculty Empowerment recognizes the individual and community trauma experienced as a result of the pandemic, taking of Black lives and subsequent protests that erupted across our nation during mandatory remote learning. As musical theatre training requires students to utilize the full self, a shift in training is needed to encompass the trauma that we all now hold. While building a specially designed program to help us meet the present moment, Faculty Empowerment will partner with University of Michigan’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion office as well as Counseling and Psychological Services to create a framework that addresses the whole person in artistic training practice. By teaching alternative classroom culture structures, principled disagreement strategies, and somatic mindfulness, Faculty Empowerment will provide skills and tools for faculty to engaged today’s young artists as we navigate our new normal in the Department of Musical Theatre.