Excelsia college is a faith-based higher education institution in NSW Australia, about 15km north of Sydney. It has a very selective set of degrees offered, focusing on performance arts (music and theatre), business management, counseling services, and education.
Excelsia College aims to provide a comprehensive, career-oriented education that is also founded in Christian values. Small class sizes and an active on-campus life join together a diverse group of students through community involvement and a shared commitment to enriching their personal and professional lives through concomitantly studying the professional world and how Christian spirituality can guide them through it.
Considered cohesively, the university-wide curriculum gives four aims: Worldview, ethics, biblical studies, and vocation. The worldview aspect is the most expansive, seeking "to clarify the way we conceptualise God, the world, the human person, and morality." It is a faith-based education in reason, giving students the resources to "assess critically whether a worldview is both intellectually and practically coherent." The ethics element is a historical examination of formative Western Christian philosophers, many of whom continue to influence religious and secular ethical thought today. Combined with the biblical studies element, students develop their ability to read both text and subtext by a careful study of biblical narrative and the implications and ethical suggestions that underly the text. Finally, a focus on vocation prepares students to implement this understanding of humans and the world in the modern world. The college focuses on disciplines in which ethical questions are very prevalent, so this focus on acting in a way that reflects one's ethical and ontological beliefs is very significant.
The curricula for the creative disciplines (dramatic and musical arts, and teaching [yes, I do consider teaching a creative profession]) culminate in high-level meta-textual interpretative studies. This approach allows students to develop solid foundations in primary text exposure as well as secondary, aesthetic and/or practice based theory before attempting to view the pieces from a more abstract structure. Such a method has two clear benefits. Firstly, the groundwork is laid out as informative, instructive, and developmental. The education is based on content and curriculum design and allows students to navigate their own way through the material presented. Higher education at large tends to downplay the malleability of their entry-level students' opinions and understanding of the world. In a large university, education is easily subsumed into the rest of the university experience--a task to be completed in order to justify the much more enjoyable times outside of class. Smaller colleges and universities, faith-based and secular, are able to use their campus to unify the in and out of class educational experience. Students are more likely to know each other and their area of study, which reduces the divide between students' in class and out of class lives. This is not to say that every student at a small school is always engaged in academic pursuit, more just that the campus tends to resemble a cohesive community rather than a city of strangers who happen to be similarly aged.
This communal aspect can have its shortcomings as well. In both big and small universities, an early focus on the historical theoretical elements behind a work--often found in secondary sources--can give the curriculum an uncomfortably ideological element. The necessary stage wherein content is accepted for the sake of itself, or for achieving a certain standard for breadth of knowledge in one subject or another, is forgone, sometimes seemingly out of professors' confidence in their own ability and development. The ideal programme at a small university will value this breadth of understanding with the ultimate goal, that students complete their education with a heightened ability to engage and interpret new material. Looking further into the curricula of the arts programs at Excelsia illustrates how they go about this.
In the acting curriculum, multiple credits are devoted to voice, movement, history, production, stage management and design (among many other topics) before meta-textual studies are introduced. The musical arts are developed similarly, covering performance, ensemble studies, history, perceptive studies, harmonics, etc., before introducing composition studies, faith-based music studies, and ethnomusicology. Both of these courses share a fifteen credit series of courses, Faith and the Contemporary Artist, allowing for a concomitant practice and theory based education that gives due respect to how an understanding of the technical practices of any discipline can offer a more nuanced view into its emotive or allegorical content. The Faith and the Contemporary Artist series, being offered to both colleges of art, also gives students the opportunity to see how different mediums might engender different opinions on the role of the contemporary artist, and how their varying economies and histories might contribute to that. Many universities include these sort of cross-disciplinary courses, but by focusing on the contemporary art community at large as well as the roles that prospective new members can play in that community, while also unifying two different communities of students within the school, the program is able to reflect its own goals within its structure as well as its content.
The other disciplines--business, counseling, and education--follow a similar trajectory, stressing the importance of a contemporary and historical understanding of their respective industries, while simultaneously grounding this knowledge in the Christian ethical tradition.
Many of the graduate courses in business cover management techniques, which directly relate to the question of how to ethically lead groups of people. The economics portion conveys the ethics behind where those people are being led; business has always been ethically 'complex', and it is important to reconcile within oneself the often combative tactics of global capital with one's personal ethical convictions.
Teaching and counseling courses are directly related to the (re)formation of other persons, and is therefore in critical need of ethical underpinnings. These choice of Excelsia College to include these disciplines in their intentionally limited offerings of degrees highlights their commitment to encouraging their students to not only succeed in their professional lives, but to also share their own education in service of the world around them.
