Two notes (overlapping) from EASTMAN (response to our inquiry)
Dear Ron,
How's it going? Jon Baldo forwarded me your recent email regarding the upcoming CLEA conference, in which you solicited issues that might be of interest for our department. I am glad to respond. At the one CLEA conference I attended, the most useful and illuminating interactions, whether in formal settings or informal conversations, were open discussions over how our very different institutions dealt with similar concerns. Below is a list of some issues that have been on the minds of our humanities faculty over the last couple years:
-ESL. Art and music students whose English is non-native pose certain challenges across the curriculum, perhaps nowhere more than in humanities/liberal arts classes. It is a broad issue, that involves admission offices, support services like advising and international student offices, and, of course, instructors. It also has different kinds of impact at the undergraduate and graduate levels. In Seattle you might have met our newly hired ESL instructor, Caterina Falli. She has been developing over the last couple years a program that addresses the needs of the students, and is working with the administration, admissions, and both graduate and undergraduate deans. It might be useful to hear about how different programs address this question.
-Required "core" sequence. We recently dropped our Western Civ core courses in favor of a one-semester Freshman Writing Seminar. It might be interesting to have a discussion of the different kinds of core courses, and their pros and cons, for anyone who is contemplating curricular revision, or trying to assess their current program. What is the goal of these courses? How necessary are they? How does one measure the success of one model over the other?
-Internet II. We had our first long-distance course at Eastman, in our department (co-taught with a professor at SUNY-Buffalo). It was a success, but not without glitches. A presentation on how to devise such a class and what to watch out for, would be useful. A frank discussion of what is gained and what is lost in such encounters might be interesting, as on-line and distance courses seem to be in the future whether we welcome them or not.
-Interdisciplinarity. This is a buzzword, but many of us live it intra-departmentally every day of the year. We have 8 full-time faculty, all in different disciplines, and we are currently conducting a search in yet another new discipline, Political Science. There are challenges to hiring, reviewing, and tenuring faculty from the other side of a disciplinary boundary, as well as clear benefits from having such a diverse faculty.
Voila. Best, Tim
Ron,
Here are some things that have been going on at Eastman over the past couple of years that might be of interest to CLEA.
1) This year we finally retired our 2-semester Freshman core course, The Western Cultural Tradition, in favor of a one-semester Freshman Writing Seminar. Each section has a different disciplinary and thematic focus, on something like a Writing Across the Curriculum model. Students now have free elective choice in the second semester, which is one of the hallmarks of our program as a whole. We have a growing number of students who take advantage of this liberty to craft double degrees, double majors, and minors in a liberal arts/sciences discipline. If CLEA had a panel on rethinking the core, my colleague Jean Pedersen would, I think, represent us very well. She has been freshman course coordinator for several years.
2) We have fully integrated the Writing and Study Skills Center, which my colleague Caterina Falli runs, into the new freshman course. Each student will visit the Center at least three times in the fall semester, in three different formats--tutorial, small group, and group workshop. I think it would be great if CLEA included a panel on the particular challenges and strategies of writing centers at arts schools; I believe Caterina would be eager to participate in such a panel, though I have not approached her about the idea.
3) Eastman has experimented with Internet II technology for purposes of team-teaching, linking faculty in different disciplines (German and history) at different institutions (Eastman and SUNY/Buffalo). This resulted in a class of performing artists (musicians) joining a more typical college seminar constituency, including history majors and non-majors. Other experiments in using the same technology include a master class given by an Eastman studio faculty member to students overseas; a joint recital with chamber music groups in remote locations; and a five-way interview of Steve Reich on the occasion of his 70th birthday celebration in London, bringing Eastman into conversation with four music departments in the UK. My colleague in German, Reinhild Steingrover, might be a good candidate to talk about this.
4) Since we are an interdisciplinary department, like most comparable departments in the CLEA schools, we continually think about interdisciplinarity--within the humanities, between the humanities and the social sciences (since our department comprises both), and between our department and the various musical disciplines in the school. We have no large-scale initiative on which to report under this heading, though we perpetually have small-scale initiatives and experiments. I think it is an important topic for CLEA to visit periodically. Of course, collaboration is a large umbrella term that could include interdisciplinarity, but a panel focused more narrowly on cross-disciplinary initiatives might be worthwhile, since we all presumably labor to make connections between our fields and the performing and visual arts which are the focus of our schools' curricula.
By the way, Tim Scheie and I both think it might be productive to introduce a new set of our colleagues to CLEA in the spring.
That's all for now. Let's talk soon!
Jon
Jonathan Baldo
Department of Humanities
Eastman School of Music
How's it going? Jon Baldo forwarded me your recent email regarding the upcoming CLEA conference, in which you solicited issues that might be of interest for our department. I am glad to respond. At the one CLEA conference I attended, the most useful and illuminating interactions, whether in formal settings or informal conversations, were open discussions over how our very different institutions dealt with similar concerns. Below is a list of some issues that have been on the minds of our humanities faculty over the last couple years:
-ESL. Art and music students whose English is non-native pose certain challenges across the curriculum, perhaps nowhere more than in humanities/liberal arts classes. It is a broad issue, that involves admission offices, support services like advising and international student offices, and, of course, instructors. It also has different kinds of impact at the undergraduate and graduate levels. In Seattle you might have met our newly hired ESL instructor, Caterina Falli. She has been developing over the last couple years a program that addresses the needs of the students, and is working with the administration, admissions, and both graduate and undergraduate deans. It might be useful to hear about how different programs address this question.
-Required "core" sequence. We recently dropped our Western Civ core courses in favor of a one-semester Freshman Writing Seminar. It might be interesting to have a discussion of the different kinds of core courses, and their pros and cons, for anyone who is contemplating curricular revision, or trying to assess their current program. What is the goal of these courses? How necessary are they? How does one measure the success of one model over the other?
-Internet II. We had our first long-distance course at Eastman, in our department (co-taught with a professor at SUNY-Buffalo). It was a success, but not without glitches. A presentation on how to devise such a class and what to watch out for, would be useful. A frank discussion of what is gained and what is lost in such encounters might be interesting, as on-line and distance courses seem to be in the future whether we welcome them or not.
-Interdisciplinarity. This is a buzzword, but many of us live it intra-departmentally every day of the year. We have 8 full-time faculty, all in different disciplines, and we are currently conducting a search in yet another new discipline, Political Science. There are challenges to hiring, reviewing, and tenuring faculty from the other side of a disciplinary boundary, as well as clear benefits from having such a diverse faculty.
Voila. Best, Tim
Ron,
Here are some things that have been going on at Eastman over the past couple of years that might be of interest to CLEA.
1) This year we finally retired our 2-semester Freshman core course, The Western Cultural Tradition, in favor of a one-semester Freshman Writing Seminar. Each section has a different disciplinary and thematic focus, on something like a Writing Across the Curriculum model. Students now have free elective choice in the second semester, which is one of the hallmarks of our program as a whole. We have a growing number of students who take advantage of this liberty to craft double degrees, double majors, and minors in a liberal arts/sciences discipline. If CLEA had a panel on rethinking the core, my colleague Jean Pedersen would, I think, represent us very well. She has been freshman course coordinator for several years.
2) We have fully integrated the Writing and Study Skills Center, which my colleague Caterina Falli runs, into the new freshman course. Each student will visit the Center at least three times in the fall semester, in three different formats--tutorial, small group, and group workshop. I think it would be great if CLEA included a panel on the particular challenges and strategies of writing centers at arts schools; I believe Caterina would be eager to participate in such a panel, though I have not approached her about the idea.
3) Eastman has experimented with Internet II technology for purposes of team-teaching, linking faculty in different disciplines (German and history) at different institutions (Eastman and SUNY/Buffalo). This resulted in a class of performing artists (musicians) joining a more typical college seminar constituency, including history majors and non-majors. Other experiments in using the same technology include a master class given by an Eastman studio faculty member to students overseas; a joint recital with chamber music groups in remote locations; and a five-way interview of Steve Reich on the occasion of his 70th birthday celebration in London, bringing Eastman into conversation with four music departments in the UK. My colleague in German, Reinhild Steingrover, might be a good candidate to talk about this.
4) Since we are an interdisciplinary department, like most comparable departments in the CLEA schools, we continually think about interdisciplinarity--within the humanities, between the humanities and the social sciences (since our department comprises both), and between our department and the various musical disciplines in the school. We have no large-scale initiative on which to report under this heading, though we perpetually have small-scale initiatives and experiments. I think it is an important topic for CLEA to visit periodically. Of course, collaboration is a large umbrella term that could include interdisciplinarity, but a panel focused more narrowly on cross-disciplinary initiatives might be worthwhile, since we all presumably labor to make connections between our fields and the performing and visual arts which are the focus of our schools' curricula.
By the way, Tim Scheie and I both think it might be productive to introduce a new set of our colleagues to CLEA in the spring.
That's all for now. Let's talk soon!
Jon
Jonathan Baldo
Department of Humanities
Eastman School of Music
posted by Ron at 1:59 PM
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