Fine Arts

Leader: Julian Olf, Professor of Dramaturgy and Graduate Program Director, University of Massachusetts

Recorder: Mary Leming, Assistant to the Director, The Reinvention Center

If we accept John Dewey's idea that direct experience, or discovery guided by mentoring, is the corner-post of education, then arts educators at research institutions are Dewey's 'corner-poster children.' Reciprocal discovery occurs daily in studios, theaters and recital halls throughout these institutions, where the research and scholarly interests of both student and mentor are generated, examined, revised, elaborated upon and put to the test. The Boyer Commission recognized that "students in the arts are engaged in independent research throughout their programs" and that the relationship between arts undergraduates and instructors involves "a kind of mentoring [that] needs to be emulated throughout universities."

While it may be true that all disciplines stand to learn from the arts, it is also true that arts educators and their students have yet to derive maximum benefit from their affiliation with research institutions. This session examined the numerous and varied ways in which arts instruction successfully implements the discovery and communication of creative achievements.

Participants also discussed some compelling issues confronting arts education, such as:

• Study of the fine and performing arts tends to be highly prescriptive and intensively disciplinary. Without dissipating what must remain focused pursuits, how can we make arts students and faculty more open to the many opportunities for interdisciplinary experience that are available at a research university?
• When one leaves the studio or performance setting and wanders across the hall to larger, humanities-based arts classes-- in art history, musicology, and dramaturgy, for example --the opportunities for guided mentoring and reciprocal research are fewer. Can the humanities components of arts programs be reconceived in a manner that would allow a more individualized and reciprocal approach to discovery?
• When arts faculties teach non-arts students, it is usually in the context of large, general education courses where independent discovery and student-mentor reciprocity are distant, if not entirely unattainable, goals. How can we provide non-arts students with a sense of the excitement of discovery that is so central to arts disciplines?
• For all its demonstrable value, the tutorial model of instruction renders arts programs comparatively expensive and therefore vulnerable in a fluctuating economic environment. While they do receive outside support for special projects, arts programs tend to be less successful than their non-arts neighbors in generating large grants. In an FTE-driven world, how can the arts best position themselves both to compete for the allocation of internal resources and to generate the interest of outside funding agencies?

Main Points

The arts comprise a variety of separate disciplines, each of which has a slightly different model and tradition for students. All the models, however, already embody many of the educational experiences that other disciplines wish to adopt. In theatre, most output involves the commingling of the research and scholarly efforts of faculty, graduate and undergraduate students. Many graduate students come in with prior professional experience and bring cutting-edge interests and technology to the department. They are often among the most innovative teachers and their work directly affects undergraduates. In music, undergraduate and graduate students and faculty are integrated in composition, curriculum, and performance; students often play new faculty pieces. In fine art, the foundation courses are entirely based on close student-faculty interaction. Faculty studios are in close proximity to undergraduate studios, and are the site of advising and other faculty-student meetings. Students attend receptions, see faculty work in progress, and otherwise are incorporated into the ongoing activity of the faculty.

Yet there are both opportunities for and challenges to improving undergraduate education in the arts at research universities.

Opportunities

• The arts are already a good model in many ways, through one-on-one instruction and faculty and undergraduate studios in close proximity. What other elements of the arts model might be usable in other disciplines? For instance, there is an aspect of performance that has deadlines, that provides a moment you work up to, that other disciplines can learn from.
  
• Arts education in research universities benefits from a rich array of resources. How do you render departments nimble and flexible, to interact with other units on campus?

Challenges

• Even in the arts, students too often learn by imitation, not original creation. Universities do not necessarily empower their students to take risks. How can faculty make the arts curriculum about joint discovery, not about memorizing genres and styles and periods?
• The "intense disciplinarity" of the arts has both strengths and weaknesses. The need to cover major courses often makes it impossible for faculty to teach their special interests. How can arts faculty make a dent in seemingly impervious disciplinary barriers? How can students and faculty be freed up to do things other than satisfy the requirements?
• How do you expose the huge mass of students in general education courses to the discovery and excitement that is at the core of the disciplines? Where do you begin to rethink those requirements?
• Arts education is labor-intensive and thus expensive because it is mentor-based and there are low student-faculty ratios (i.e. no more than 12 students in a writing class). How do you compensate for its high cost?
• Faculty in other disciplines do not always understand what arts departments do and they do not necessarily consider their activities "research." This is a challenge both for arts faculty and for students who wish to undertake creative projects in the context of a campus-wide "undergraduate research" program.

The discussion centered on the last issue. One participant felt that, "The challenge is to get the research university to understand that creative disciplines have a place. They are teaching cognitive and physical skills that are not 'research' or 'scholarship' per se but ought to be understood and respected on the same level." Dr. Olf concurred but cautioned that saying the arts are "not research" runs the risk of diminishing them in the university environment. Artists are in their own way creating knowledge, creating and sharing a view of the world, and communicating on a level that has the same weight that traditional scholarship has. One cannot avoid calling such creative activity "research," especially in theater, where a production involves a lot of what is traditionally considered research. In the arts, just as in other disciplines, one needs certain skills and must master a certain body of knowledge, and the faculty are promoted on the basis of their products, whether that product is a journal article or a performance.

There are certain ways, however, in which creative work is fundamentally different from other disciplines. Difficulties arise when these differences are not acknowledged and rules are too-uniformly applied. Some institutions, for instance, have review boards that present hurdles to students who wish to undertake creative projects, especially for confrontational performances or installation art, by requiring the students to consider the audience as "subjects" and to seek approval for the project from the review board.

One of the greatest differences is the difficulty of documenting work with fine arts students except with a finished product. Ironically, the arts are about "erasing the seams of our labors," making a finished work appear spontaneous, without showing the interim steps and first drafts. This is at odds with the larger university concept that, "If it looks or seems spontaneous, what good could it be?" Articles describing scientific discoveries, for example, clearly outline the method by which the results were arrived at, but creative works seldom indicate the hours of rehearsal and crumpled first sketches that precede them.

A student's ability to articulate his or her ideas and goals and the process by which he or she arrived at the final product is one hallmark of a senior thesis, according to a University of Delaware participant. The University of Delaware and other institutions have struggled with the question of what distinguishes a thesis from a senior show and what an honors student in the arts should be expected to do over and above what a typical student would do.

This articulation is not always easy, however, for students in the arts. As one participant explained, there is a distinct difference between science students who are comfortable articulating the process and arts students who are not, who are only comfortable presenting the finished product. Yet another participant, a graduate student in music, suggested that it was important for students to make the effort to do so: "If we are asking our institutions to sponsor our art, the least we can do is help explain it through our writing."

In closing the session, Dr. Olf cited a Bauhaus artist who said, "I can teach anyone to draw a circle, but I can't teach everyone to experience a circle." The experience is what makes it art and is extremely difficult to put into words. Doing so will take years of practice, requiring research into one's self, into materials, and into the world of ideas as much as any other research requires.

Examples of Effective Programs

Dr. Olf described several initiatives in which arts programs interacted with other departments on campus to mutual benefit.

The University of Massachusetts is piloting a new 6-year degree in architecture that has just been accredited. It runs from the freshman year through the Master's degree and draws on a wide range of departments including structural and mechanical engineering, architecture, regional planning, landscape design, history, art history, classics, economics and geosciences.

The University of Toledo Law School wanted to conduct mock trials and asked the drama department to recruit student actors to help the law students. At Stony Brook University, the drama department provided student actors to play the roles of chronically-ill patients to work through scenarios with medical students.

Session participants mentioned several ways in which they promoted creative activity among undergraduates and overcame some of the associated challenges.

At Stony Brook University, the Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities (URECA) office provides arts students with small grants throughout the year to purchase materials, performance rights, etc., instead of giving one large summer grant as it does for other students.

At SUNY Albany, departments created a spreadsheet or rubric for arts faculty providing equivalencies to publication in refereed journals, book publications and other measures of "research productivity" in other disciplines.

SUNY Albany has also experimented with two potential models in response to the question, How do you finance the expensive arts courses?

1. 'Buy' small courses by also teaching some very large ones, such as a popular lecture class on horror films.
2. Collaborate with the sciences through team-taught courses and other projects that explore the intersections of science and the arts. Such collaborations not only lead to new understandings but they have the potential for funding from a variety of sources. SUNY Albany, for example, received a grant from NASA to develop a team-taught class on "Using Art to Communicate with Extra-Terrestrials."

The University of Maryland, Baltimore County, revised its traditional call for proposals for undergraduate research/ scholarly projects to include the fine and performing arts. Seven years ago the University introduced undergraduate research fellowships, but did not receive proposals from students in the arts because the publicity and guidelines were based on a science model and did not address them. To further emphasize the inclusion of the arts, the University also changed the name of its undergraduate research symposium to "URCAD: Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement Day."

Recommendations

Administrators and professors should charge themselves to explore the meaning of "research" across disciplines with two goals in mind

1. To discover differences and commonalities.
2. To promote revision and, where desirable, change.

By considering the following questions, we can discover the differences and commonalities:

1. What are the steps of artistic decision?
2. What is the nature of creative decision-making in the arts versus creative decision making in the lab?
3. How do people of different disciplines view/hear/perceive the same situation?

Scientists and artists should consider and discuss the following commonalities:

1. Communication is at the core of both science and the arts. Scientists communicate their results through publication, and artists communicate their messages through creative works. For the artist, the creative work itself is the scholarship, the publication.
2. Both the scientist and the artist conduct research. For the artist, the prior learning and rehearsal constitute the research.

Resources

Web sites:
Stony Brook University
Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities (URECA): http://www.sunysb.edu/ureca/

University at Albany, SUNY
Lecture course, "Society's Nightmares: Horror Fiction and Film": http://www.albany.edu/~jej84/243qB2.htm

University of California, Los Angeles
"Sciart" Poster Project: http://www.pdksciart.com/homepage.htm
Pamela Davis Kivelson, an artist based at UCLA, received funding from the National Science Foundation and other sources to create a series of posters with text illustrating the careers of women scientists.

University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement Day (URCAD): http://www.umbc.edu/provost/UndergradResearch/Undergrad.html

University of Delaware
Arts and Humanities Scholars Handbook: http://www.udel.edu/UR/humhnd.html#do
The Handbook includes descriptions of student projects and illustrates the ways in which they have been encouraged to reflect on their work and the process by which they arrived at the finished product.