Program Description
The Governor's School at Christopher Newport University 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 provides gifted and talented students from throughout the Commonwealth of Virginia a theme-driven learning experience that incorporates dance, theatre, visual art, music, social sciences, literature, and rhetoric in non-traditional ensemble and classroom environments. 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.
Students entering the humanities 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.
Students entering the visual and performing arts 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.
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.