Experiments in Interdisciplinarity, the Arts, and Ecologies of Sound

This intensive arts course explores sound ecology and sustainability across the performing and plastic arts. Here, sound ecology means more than recording environmental sound. It is a relational practice of listening in which human communities, other living beings, technologies, cultural memories and territories keep shaping one another.

Campo Grande is an urban gateway to the Pantanal and a meeting point for the ecological and cultural realities of Mato Grosso do Sul, including the knowledge and artistic practices of nearby Indigenous communities. Through soundwalks, field recording, improvisation and collaborative creation, students investigate how the performing arts can turn environmental listening into an embodied, collective experience. Artists and educators from Brazil and the United States work side by side through open-ended, experiential, group-oriented teaching. The course ends with a public interdisciplinary performance.

This is a variable-credit course: students can take it for 0, 1, 2 or 3 credits, and every path includes the full experience in Campo Grande. Offered in conjunction with TC's Office of Global Engagement and the Consortium for Diplomacy and Global Action.

Course Objectives

The course is built on four commitments:

• The arts as civic encounter: making things together across difference, uncertainty and discipline to imagine a shared public world.
• Collaborative, inquiry-based practice: learning as invention rather than instruction, with the teacher as a partner who listens and makes room for surprise.
• Shared meaning and sustainable futures: co-making to negotiate difference and co-author knowledge that is tested, embodied and experienced.
• Intercultural dialogue: exchange between students from the United States and Brazil, where translation itself becomes an art form.

Course Topics (Guiding Questions)

• What is the value of interdisciplinary work in art and education, and how is it related to sustainability?
• How does collaboration foster not only new ideas, but novel and hybrid aesthetic forms?
• What role might ecological sustainability play in shaping artistic and educational outcomes? How does storytelling advance mutuality, action and planning?
• How does process-based learning give shape to a more sustainable world and work in tandem with artistic outcomes?
• What do these explorations mean for teaching and learning in any discipline, place, age or ability? How can we build more inclusive classrooms across difference?
• How might we move our discoveries into larger public and civic realms?

Anticipated Stakeholder Engagement

• Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul (UFMS), Department of Music
• Brazilian artists and educators
• UFMS students
• Aldeia Água Branca
• Local instructors
• Campo Grande public

FLEX Program: This is a Flex Study Abroad course. TC delivers the course with its partner in Campo Grande for a $400 Flex program fee, and you plan and book your own flights, lodging and meals at the level that suits you.