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The Governor's School at the University of Richmond
operates as an inter-disciplinary team-taught instructional model
that combines the arts and humanities, including dance, visual art,
theatre, music, literature, rhetoric, and the social sciences. Two
independent schools - Governor's School for Humanities and Governor's
School for Visual & Performing Arts - work in cooperation and
conjunction with one another, providing learners an opportunity
to interact and study with students and instructors from both schools.
The model for the Governor's School curriculum is interdisciplinary
and team taught in nature and has been recently addressed in the
literature as the "transdisciplinary approach."
The primary mission of the program is fourfold:
- foster relationships characterized by
commitment to scholarship and discovery, mutual respect, openness
to ideas, and trust between and among students and staff.
- create an intellectually safe and challenging
residential environment for learning in the humanities and the
arts using nontraditional instruction techniques.
- stimulate the creative process, encourage
and support collaborative learning and instruction, and develop
individual and group talents.
- provide a safe and secure instructional
and residential environment conducive to learning, firmly rooted
in mutual respect among all members of the community.
The Governor's School for the Humanities
at the University of Richmond provides gifted and talented students
from throughout the Commonwealth of Virginia a theme-driven learning
experience that incorporates international arts, social sciences,
literatures, and rhetoric in non-traditional classroom environments.
Students entering the program select courses developed by teaching
teams around a central theme. While students do not always receive
their first choice in course selection, each course incorporates
various aspects of the humanities in such a way that students in
every class cover a broad and richly varied curriculum. Teaching
teams work to provide a non-traditional and intellectually safe
learning environment in which students take part in deciding the
direction each course takes. In this environment, instructors and
students create a community of learners encountering new horizons
and learning new lessons about their world and about one another.
The Governor's School for the Visual &
Performing Arts at the University of Richmond provides gifted and
talented student artists from throughout the Commonwealth of Virginia
a theme-driven learning experience that incorporates dance, theatre,
visual art, and music with the humanities in non-traditional ensemble
and classroom environments. Students entering the program enroll
in theory and ensemble practice courses devoted to their individual
art form, which have been developed by instructors around a central
theme. Each course offers students opportunities to explore all
aspects of their chosen field of expertise, including both theoretical
and practical aspects of the art discipline. Instructors, experts
in their fields, create and provide coursework and master classes
that offer students ample tutelage while suggesting new avenues
of independent growth and development. In this environment, instructors
and students create a community of learners encountering new horizons
and learning new lessons about their world and about one another.
Each school exists in conjunction with the
other. The Governor's School for Visual & Performing Arts is
not based on a conservatory model, as more than half of each day
is devoted to interdisciplinary pursuits. Thus, both schools operate
at the same time using the same facilities, administration, resident
advisors, and faculty members. Both schools center their courses
of study on a central theme. Yet while both schools work together,
each school retains its own identity through much of the summer's
coursework.
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