Subject: What are the differences between teaching ST/SD and other subjects?

Posted by Sharon Villines on 6/6/2010
In Reply To:What are the differences between teaching ST/SD and other subjects? Posted by Tony Phuah on 6/6/2010

Message:

On Jun 6, 2010, at 9:37 AM, tony phuah wrote:

> If I read your comment correctly, it seems to suggest that
> conventional subjects actually seldom try to assess their transfer of
> learning to students' everyday life for longer period of time.

At the college level, the professors often consider this mundane.
Their job is to raise standards and teach pure knowledge. If they need an example in business, for example, they go to a major corporation or Harvard Business School Case Studies, not to a local corporation where the students would get a lot of attention and more hands on learning.

When I was a child, it never occurred to me that people wrote books. I never thought of where the came from even though I was an avid reader.
They were all library books so I guess i thought they had always had existed. Now we have author tours and artists in the schools. My granddaughters think nothing of writing their own books (short and not always complete).

I argued with a colleague a the college who ran a semester in New York program for artists. They had a studio, paid for by financial aid, and internships with artists. He insisted on getting internships with "top" artists, which mean currently fashionable. The problem was that these internships resulted in being the underling to the underling and spotting the artist across the warehouse-sized studio. Maybe meeting them once or twice.

One of my students who enrolled in the program insisted on doing an internship with a painter whose work she admired. The artist was actively showing and had a gallery on 57th Street but she wasn't fashionable and didn't have work in the major museum collections yet.
But my student learned first-hand how to manage all the business aspects of being an artist and accompanied the artist to openings, parties, interviews with potential purchasers, and dinner with the artist's dealer.

The artist was at a professional level much closer to my student's so the learning could be applied immediately. She also refused to move into the school's studio because she had one at home and preferred to work with no distractions and all night if she felt like it without having to be out on the streets of the city. She brought her paintings to the studio for critiques.

My colleague said my student wasn't meeting the right people. Do you know what it means to have a recommendation from _____? Well, none of his students ever became famous and most didn't have enough paintings done when they graduated to even think about asking for a recommendation to a dealer. They were too busy meeting people to learn how to find a studio they could afford when they graduated.

My student (not because she was mine but that's the most convenient way to identify her) was able to use her practical connections to get a shared studio in a neighborhood of artists like herself and become an active self-supporting artist -- as much as artists are ever self- supporting. She was still working as a waiter but in the 1980s almost every artist in NY was working as a waiter.

The important thing was that she had a studio in NY, a host of connections at her level of development, and the skills to use them.

Long again. i guess if I write at all, I write long.

Sharon

Follow Ups:

What are the differences between teaching ST/SD and other subjects? - Tony Phuah 6/7/2010 
What are the differences between teaching ST/SD and other subjects? - Sharon Villines 6/7/2010
What are the differences between teaching ST/SD and other subjects? - Bob Gorman 6/7/2010