Learning Outcomes

• Disciplinary Knowledge: Knowledge and comprehension of the fundamental concepts and processes relevant to the communication, film, and theatre disciplines and their professional subfields.

  • Demonstrating an understanding of basic human and mediated communication process models.
  • Identifying major developments and personalities in media practices across eras and cultures.
  • Demonstrating the ability to historically frame the development and evolution of media and live performance.
  • Demonstrating a baseline understanding of current issues and controversies in the fields of media and live performance.
  • Demonstrating baseline fluency in commonplace disciplinary vocabulary.
  • Demonstrating a basic understanding of the prevailing communication modalities of media and live performance
  • Understanding key practices of the professional subfields.

• Critical Thinking: Critically analyze media and performance practices through rhetorical inquiry, evaluation of complex ideas, artifacts, information and arguments to formulate well-reasoned beliefs and conclusions.

  • Identifying social, political and cultural meanings embedded in media and live performance.
  • Recognizing the social, political, cultural and global influence of media and live performance.
  • Analyzing media using rhetorical methods.
  • Critiquing texts and media/performance concepts, with an eye toward putting theory into practice.
  • Identifying, assessing and solving problems in a production setting.
  • Formulating well-reasoned beliefs, judgements and conclusions in support of a media/performance concept or approach.

• Ethical Reasoning: Requires students to recognize ethical issues, identify their own ethical positions and analyze other ethical perspectives in real-world situations in order to consider the impact of decisions and actions on other individuals, society and the environment.

  • Demonstrating an understanding of the role of ethics in shaping media and live performance events in interpersonal, organizational, social, political, and cultural contexts and frameworks.
  • Recognizing issues pertaining to equity and representation of marginalized people in the creation and production of work in the media and entertainment industry.
  • Identifying their own ethical positions related to the power of media to hold a mirror to society.
  • Analyzing ethical positions of past and present media and performance historians and critics.
  • Considering the impact of storytelling on other individuals and societies, and the environmental impact of current media and performance practices.

• Communication: Recognize and utilize the most appropriate means to address specific audiences in relevant contexts or genres in order to effectively inform or persuade.

  • Creating, selecting, adapting and presenting messages in multiple distribution modalities to accomplish media and performance event goals.
  • Acknowledging and understanding differences in communication constructs, interpretation, effects and consequences.
  • Identifying the role of physical, verbal, written and visual communication in media and live performance
  • Determining which combination of methods will be most compelling, given the relevant context or genre, to inform or persuade a specific audience.
  • Devising creative forms of expression and using them to fluently communicate an intended meaning.

• Creativity: Synthesize ideas, perspectives, information, or materials in original and self-aware ways, and use that synthesis to generate imaginative acts or products.

  • Designing/developing and proposing contributions to the creation of media and performative works.
  • Solving theoretical and practical production issues in innovative ways.
  • Applying a tangible skill set, relative to their specialty/concentration, to a collaborative creative deliverable.

• Quantitative Literacy: Competency in working with numerical data to reason or solve problems, the ability to make judgements and draw conclusions supported by quantitative evidence, and the ability to communicate those arguments utilizing quantitative tools.

  • Explaining, synthesizing, and applying communication theory in the design and execution of research projects.
  • Constructing and executing research projects to investigate practical and scholarly questions within diverse media and performance fields, including technical studio production systems.
  • Analyzing and interpreting quantitative results from research projects.
  • Interpreting and explaining information presented in CAD drawings such as ground plans and elevations, light plots and projection calculation diagrams.
  • Converting information into quantitative forms such as production management spreadsheets, cue lists, lighting magic sheets and costume plots.
  • Expressing quantitative evidence in support of design choices and technical specifications for theoretical, staged, and/or filmed productions and interactive installations.