International Journal of Education & the Arts

Citation: Goodwin, A. Y. (2024). De-Centering the West in the costume curriculum: Educators share their experience. International Journal of Education & the Arts, 25(si2.6). http://doi.org/10.26209/ijea25si2.6

This paper presents and examines responses to the survey of costume educators/artists in American institutions of higher education conducted by the author in December of 2022. The educators were asked, in a series of individual semi-formal interviews, to talk about their process of shifting their pedagogies away from centering Western aesthetics, ideas, and conceptions of linear time in any costume courses, including design, history, construction, and costume crafts; to attempt to pinpoint specific obstacles to their work; and to offer ideas of how institutions—academic departments and programs, but also, colleges and universities as a whole—may better support these efforts. There were six interviewees from six different institutions, ranging between a small private liberal arts religiously affiliated college and an R-1state land-grant university. At the time, all respondents served theatre departments, schools, or programs that presented a production season which was a major curricular component of the students’ educational experience. Respondents self-identified as having recently changed their teaching with the specific purposes of dismantling Western supremacy in the ideas and content presented in their courses and adapting their instruction and assessment methods with the same goals in mind. Respondents were not selected based on academic rank or whether or not their appointments were faculty or staff. Though each educator’s approach to the work took on characteristics suited to their specific academic and production environment, a pattern emerged in how the work originated, who its main champions were, and what barriers remained despite general statements and verbal commitments made by institutions at large.