Shortly after setting up my DIY syllabus for an “MFA in Theatre: Themed Experience”, I realized that it might be helpful to write about my progress and findings, in case it’s helpful for those of you who want to take on a similar challenge!
* Here’s where you can find a full overview of my DIY syllabus and MFA challenge.
Whew that took me a while – but I did say that I’m not going to be rushing through this. I mentioned in the last log that I would be taking a Kadenze course on fashion – but that turned out to be very bad. Instead, I found a wonderful and in-depth course on fashion history on YOUTUBE of all places. It’s called “Fifty Thousand Years of Fashion History” and it’s absolutely fantastic. I learned more in this course than I have in most university courses. And I definitely learned more in this course than I did in the MIT course on architecture.
One small note – the final lesson on current fashion titled “Today and Tomorrow” is absolutely awful. For current fashion trends you’ll have to do your own research (and there is a bunch of information related to 2000s fashion on wikipedia).
I supplemented this course with readings on costumes from the Theme Park Design textbook (pp. 279-282), along with a theme park costume project, in which I selected costumes for a theme park/land that I have yet to visit.
For my class on “Period Costumes and Architecture”, I am combining two online courses that I found on the topic. Between the two of them, I feel like I will have the a pretty good overview of how costumes and architecture developed throughout history.
I just completed the MIT course “A Global History of Architecture“, which is going to make up 50% of my “class grade”. By the time my audit of the course expired, I had finished 20/24 lectures, so I calculated that I would receive about a B-/83% in the first half of this course. But I still have 50% to go with the fashion portion, which should help bring my grade up!
Also, in case you’re wondering, there were quizzes scattered throughout the MIT course, and I supplemented the lectures with a midterm “5 Periods Project”. In this project, I picked five architectural periods that were covered in the lectures and found five theme parks or park attractions that imitate that “theming”. Here’s where it becomes so much fun to create your own “DIY MFA” program. If you were to take this class at university, you would generally not be able to do a project that connects the topic to your chosen major. The project would be as generic as possible in order to fit all student’s learning paths.
Anyways, the next course I’ll be working on is on Kadenze and it’s called “Fashion Style Icons and Design History“. This course covers more recent history while the architecture course covered mostly ancient history, which I think makes a pretty good balanced overview for the purposes of this course.
Deciding what course to start with was tricky, but I ended up deciding to go with THE 5288 – Period Costumes and Architecture. From there, I did some research to try to find an online course that would provide me with the knowledge needed to fulfill this requirement, and in that research I found the perfect MIT online course: “A Global History of Architecture“. I’ve never taken a course on architecture, so I’m finding it pretty fascinating to start from the very beginning of time. And I’m currently on week 3. I’ll be supplementing this with a fashion course and/or book later on.
The very first thing I did even before setting up my “classes”, was order the closest thing to a “textbook” on themed entertainment: Theme Park Design, by David Younger.
As soon as the book arrived, I felt verified that this idea is going to be awesome.
From there, I started pulling out the courses from UCF’s MFA program and putting them into my own syllabus.
I basically had to find free course replacements, materials from courses in the past, or action plans that would replace each of those required courses. The first step has basically just been link/resource collection and planning.
The only course requirement that would have already been completed from my prior BA in theatre would be the “Theatre Practicum I”, so I went ahead and marked that one as complete.