This paper will discuss two interdisciplinary Georgetown University courses centered around the theatrical production of Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski and designed to channel the visceral elements of viewing the production into motivation, action, and social change among students. The play chronicles the real-life story of a Georgetown professor who witnessed and reported on the horrors of the Holocaust to the Allied powers during World War II while there was still time to intervene. Rooted in arts-education and inclusive pedagogies, the undergraduate curriculum asks students to interrogate social injustices of their generation while the graduate course has Learning, Design, & Technology MA students designing learning experiences to help audience members find further engagement with the artwork. Instead of requiring students to have any previous study of the arts, these courses employed the experience of attending the performance as a central and guiding text. Across both courses, in-class experiences included attending a performance, arts-based close-looking activities, communal contributions, ongoing reflections, and frequent, iterative feedback from peers as well as from undergraduates to graduate students. As a result, both curricula utilized the ways in which the performing arts asks audiences to play, imagine, and explore both individually and while in community by repeatedly situating the classroom as a scaffolded practice space for social action in broader contexts.
Ijeoma Njaka serves as the Senior Learning Designer for Transformational and Inclusive Initiatives at the Red House and the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown University. In this joint position, she specializes in arts-based approaches to inclusive and anti-racist teaching, curricula, and faculty development. With an MA in Learning, Design, and Technology from Georgetown University and an AB from Brown University, Ijeoma is currently pursuing her doctorate in design at NC State University.