Symposium On Education In Entertainment And Engineering
The live entertainment industry presents increasingly complex challenges for technicians — whether in small community theatres or in large theme parks. At the same time, the shape of post-secondary education is changing with an increasing emphasis on hands-on learning and outcome-based instructional design becoming the norm. At the convergence of these threads is the need to effectively prepare and educate students to enter the rapidly changing world of live entertainment technology.
An inaugural symposium, scheduled for July 25 and 26, 2019, on Purdue’s West Lafayette campus. The event will highlight advances, challenges and trends in curricular design, instructional design, academic research and cross-disciplinary work related to the intersection of engineering and live entertainment. This symposium is specifically aimed at building bridges between two exceptionally different academic and professional cultures and practices; presentations will represent many different backgrounds and academic experiences.
Symposium topics explore the interstitial spaces among the disciplines of engineering, theatre technology and education, including the following areas:
- Curricular development (including explorations of curricular design, academic silos, interdisciplinary/crossdisciplinary challenges and strategies, etc.)
- Creating and navigating academic/industrial partnerships
- The relationship between “traditional research” and “creative endeavor”
- Instructional design and pedagogy in interdisciplinary/cross-disciplinary fields (Art + Engineering, Technology, ... )
- K-12 and post-secondary education(STEAM), extracurricular programming and diversity/inclusion outreach
- The relationship between traditional instruction and production/performance work
- Technology, AI and conceptualizing the theatre of the future
For more information, contact Rich Dionne, clinical assistant professor and faculty technical director in the Department of Theatre, or Mary Pilotte, associate professor of engineering practice and director of the School of Engineering Education’s undergraduate degree program. For more information about the symposium, visit 2019 Symposium on Education in Entertainment and Engineering.
