Course evaluations

As a department chair, I read more than 1,000 pages of student feedback forms every semester on more than 40 classes offered in my department. As a teacher, I know how infuriating these forms can be.

Here is a list of things that drive me nuts on student feedback forms:

Complaints that the readings or projects 'were all pretty much the same"
Whenever I read this, I want to show the student a picture of a gothic cathedral and ask which of the dozens of pillars or buttresses should be removed. There must be something about this era in which we can watch anything at any time, this age which some argue is defined by the iPod shuffle, that confuses people. Not all repetition is redundant, some is reenforcing. When you're trying to teach something new and unfamiliar, you often need to put it to them a number of different ways before they realize that the differences between the readings or projects are superficial and you're trying to communicate something about the structure. A course that flits from one topic to the another, completely different topic too easily allows students to hold their breath through unfamiliar and uncomfortable new information or experiences.

"I didn't learn anything"
Yeah, well, I didn't earn anything from the enormous expansion of wealth created by the stock market's climb over 17,000. And that's for the same reason you didn't learn anything in class - because I didn't invest in it. If you think a class is supposed to deliver technical skills and information like a hamburger at a fast food restaurant then you're not ready for college.

Ad hominem statements 
You would think that weeks, months, semesters and even years of critiques in which the conversation is directed toward the work and away from the maker would provide the tools necessary to evaluate course content and the means of instruction, but you would frequently be wrong. To many students, course evaluations are places to offer judgment about the people who teach the course. These comments most often betray the most casual sexism, age-ism, and, yes, racism, you are likely to encounter.

Bullhorn politics

So for some time I've been compiling research on how racist groups communicate their messages in the public sphere. I've spent a lot of time on the SPLC website, on the ADL site, and even a few hate groups I have tracked down. My assumption - valid until this election cycle - was that publicly displaying one's racism was a risk to these people, and that the symbols they used to telegraph their views was an essential adaptation to a world with which they are out of step.

Boy. Am I an idiot.

This has been driven home as candidates on the right have abandoned the dogwhistle for the megaphone. There are a thousand regrettable examples, but I want to just looks at this one for a minute. I don't know journalist Tom Cahill's work at all, or follow usuncut.com, but I appreciate his eye. In a story that ran on March 17, 2016, (picked up by Gawker...I know, I'm still in the depths here, but that's where this stuff happens some times) Cahill pointed out that PBS Newshour ran a story on Trump's popularity in the south on March 15 in which they spoke to (and photographed) a person named Grace Tilly and members of her family. Cahill (and others) observed that Tilly  had some prominent tattoos - one of a Celtic cross and another of the number 88. In certain contexts these signs are associated with white supremacist groups. Tilly, according to PBS, denies any white supremacist or Neo-Nazi allegiances and claims, "are connected to her family’s Celtic religious beliefs".

Is this some form of plausible deniability? I think it's hard to imagine - based on the data in the story - that the Tilly family represents a model for racial tolerance in 21st century America. Another member of the Tilly family interviewed in the piece, Pete, complains about, "all these protesters and all this stuff, and people saying [Trump is] racist" and specifically goes on to mention Black Lives Matter, before performing the signature move of racists everywhere and denying the value of race as a subject. Ms. Tilly's claim about her Celtic ancestry may or may not be true, but it tracks terribly close to the going mantra of 'heritage not hate' behind which hate now tends to hid.

So what we have here is someone who waves the (coded) flag and, when confronted on it, refuses to take responsibility for the message that's being sent. (I have considered the possibility that Ms. Tilly went to get tattoos that would celebrate her cultural identity that she thought had no meaning other than the one she intended. That is a very remote possibility given the popularity of number codes like 88...which, so far as my research has gone, has nothing to do with Celtic myth and are widely known among tattoo artists).

And this is a parent who kept her 11 year old home from school, "so that he can see democracy in action."

Grace, for the love of God, let your kid go to school. Don't do us any more favors. Please.

Which craft?

A Huffington Post essay by F. Scott Hess on de-skilling has been making the rounds.

I won't spend a lot of time on this - it's irritating to read an artist writing about the systemic problems with the art world that make his obvious brilliance invisible to everyone else on the planet. However I am interested in a couple of claims about education Hess makes and feel the need to address them.

After pointing toward a 'prejudice' in academe that privileges "Postmodern hybridity, identity politics, or pure theory", Hess writes:

The idea that you might train a surgeon to be clumsy, or an engineer to build poorly, or a lawyer to ignore law, would be patently absurd. In the arts, however, you will find an occasional musician who purposely plays badly, or a writer who ignores grammar, but only in the visual arts is training in the traditional skills of the profession systematically and often institutionally denigrated.

Can we impose a ban on comparing entirely different things...like the education of artists and physicians or attorneys? Aside from its obvious foolishness (do you really train anyone to be clumsy? isn't the point of training to remove clumsiness?) Hess' analogy obscures the fact that some surgeons are clumsy, and some lawyers do flagrantly ignore (what other people to believe to be a correct interpretation of) the law. Without these incidents, there would be no malpractices suits or legal debates.

Arguably, there would be no innovation, either. More on that in a minute, too.

Hess' article was re-posted by a few friends who identify with the crafts world, and its to that audience that he makes his strongest appeal. His ego still bruised from an incident in college (in the 70s...please... isn't getting over insults a part of growing up? If not, dealing with criticism is certainly part of becoming an artist...) Hess rails against 'conceptual' art (which he apparently confuses with the presence of concepts in art...more on that later) by collecting anecdotes from artists who have been criticized for their aesthetic conservatism or their interest in displaying skill in their work.

And yeah, I'm not going to pretend that I have never seen crits in which a student's representational work (...or exhibits in which a practicing artist's work) was greeted with yawns. But nine times out of ten those yawns came because the work was boring, not because it was figurative (believe it or not, there is dull performance, dull video art, all kinds of dull art...it's not just figurative painters who are singled out). Artists of all kinds tend to forget that the display of skill is often very dull for audiences. Couple it with the preachy allegory of Hess' paintings or the mawkish moodiness of the work he favors in his article, and you've got a dreadful cocktail of narcissism and self pity.

Like most conspiracy theories, Hess' claim that skill is out of favor sounds like an explanation for all that's wrong with the world until you look at some evidence. There are a huge number of teaching artists (working both representationally and non-representationally) for whom the conspicuous use of craft is an issue. (Locally, I'm looking at you, artist/teachers Judith Schaechter, Kurt Kauper, Susan Moore, Mark Shetabi; on a national stage, you could start with painters Kehinde Wiley, Walton Ford, sculptor Judy Fox, and go on and on and on...)

His claim that schools are brainwashing students or withholding vital information about craft is also hollow. Hess describes his tortured studies at 'a small midwestern liberal arts college in Wisconsin' (one assumes he's trying not to invoke the anger of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, from which he graduated in 1977) where the faculty failed to cater to his every whim, preferring, one assumes, to teach the curriculum they had devised...or at least to teach what they knew or believed to be important.

What Mr. Hess seems to have forgotten that to be young is to be misunderstood - terribly, savagely, horribly misunderstood. To be a young artist is to magnify that condition fifty-fold. If you're not doing something that people ten, twenty, thirty years older than you can't understand, then you're doing it wrong. Nor does he seem to appreciate that schools are not like fast food restaurants. A McDonald's hamburger in Moscow tastes exactly like one in Times Square, but a drawing class at Yale is very different from one at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Students shouldn't expect fast food hamburgers from their schools, and they should look pretty closely at the menu before they commit to attending them.

Such diversity troubles some people...especially those who hold that there are 'timeless principles' to art that must be understood. Such people tend to annoy the living daylights out of me because what is 'good' in art is what comes closest to those abstract, Platonic principles, never the messy, contingent things - the ones that tremble on the edge of falling apart in some way - that interest me. Does anyone else find it remotely troubling that all of the images that illustrate Hess' essay correspond neatly to western aesthetic fashions of the 18th and 19th centuries?

But back to clumsy surgeons and creative lawyers. Skill perfected and repeated has its place, but it's often in working beyond skill, working skillfully with unforgiving materials, or working with ideas to which the skills are not so perfectly matched that creates art in our time. (Of course one can make anything one wants in our pluralist era, but one shouldn't expect that it will be talked about...but that's another post.) It is out of these struggles that new images and ideas are born.

Once upon a time (when I happened to be an art student at the very figurative Boston University School of Fine Arts) I worked in an intensive care unit where we took care of patients who'd just had heart transplants and other cardiac procedures. (An aside: medical students - especially sleep deprived ones - are clumsy without having to be trained to be.) In our unit, physicians performed operations on some risky candidates. Some who'd  had multiple previous surgeries; others whose multiple complicating factors like age and obesity made them questionable candidates. Our hospital experimented with a ventricular assist device so horrific that one doctor compared it to parking a 'lawn mower on a patient's chest'.

By working at the very edge of their skills and technologies, by working with patients that others wouldn't work with, by transcending the display of skill and testing themselves on difficult problems with real consequences, these physicians, nurses, and patients taught me what it means to make art. There were mistakes and there were failures, but we learned from them. Hess wants us to think of artists and doctors in the same frame of mind...but I am here to tell you that it wasn't enough for the doctor to be a brilliant surgeon. You needed a smart, dedicated, and tireless nursing staff. (Maybe that nurse is the curator, or the critic...essential parts of the art world who never get mentioned in Hess's essay.) And - this is the kicker - you need a patient who is going to take his meds, do her exercises, and not assume that getting cut open is his only job. (If you're following this, the patient is the audience who is as much part of the art work as the artist).

So perhaps the last word on Hess' lament really belongs to Roland Barthes, whose writing Mr. Hess no doubt despises because he's a staple of those horrible theory classes we insist on cramming down the throats of young artists. One of Barthes' contributions to the late 20th century was the idea that readers mattered as much as (if not more than) writers. As readers, we have the authority to challenge the implicit assumptions of artworks, to question what they represent and how they represent it. We have the responsibility to ask whose interests are being served by the publication or display of some works and, if we're interested in social justice or equality in the real world as opposed to the images of these ideas that have been handed down to us, to create new visions of these virtues. It's a world where literature or art or music are not automatically important because they are connected to traditions or because artists say they're important. It's a world in which paintings, stories and songs achieve significance because people use them. "The birth of the reader," Barthes writes, "must be ransomed by the death of the author."

And the birth of the viewer comes when we stop letting our artists tell us what to think.

Tired of hearing talking about how guns make us a 'safer' nation...(UPDATED 6/18/15)

Learning Philosophies

Each of us, to get our teaching job in higher education, has had to write the dreaded ‘teaching philosophy’ statement. But now I wonder when students will start writing their learning philosophies.

This comes to mind because a student wrote to me (in my capacity as Department Chair) asking to be moved to another section of drawing because, after a week of meetings, he felt that the instructor wouldn’t ‘challenge him enough’. Apparently, this student had sought a schedule change from advising but been turned down and had finally gotten to me. There was no mention of having spoken to the instructor in this request.

I wrote back and said the department works very hard to ensure consistency across the various sections of a course number and that we don’t make changes for reasons of personality conflict. I added that an implicit part of the curriculum is teaching students to deal with diversity of approaches and methodologies in the making and discussion of art and design.

I am taking this opportunity to reflect on this statement.

It would seem to me that the student has a learning philosophy in place: classes are confrontations in which the students are challenged by the teacher. This is buttressed by a lot of language we use in classes – the idea of assigning ‘problems’ for which students need to provide ‘solutions’. In one way or another, the teacher is responsible for motivating the student by providing a challenge, either in the form of assignments or in the form of a learning atmosphere that suggests competition.

This kind of thing turns up in discussion about crits, too. A great many students complain that people are soft in crits, and give the impression that if they are not called out for something then the critique is, in some fatal way, not ‘honest.’ The implicit assumption here is that critique has a toughening-up function to fulfill, and that students need to learn to ‘defend’ their work…presumably against some imagined, adversarial viewer. In my long experience as a teacher and critic, I can honestly say that the greater challenge artists face is learning to be generous enough to engage the indifferent viewer – who cares about your work, anyway? – but that’s another essay…

The confrontational class model, and its accompanying assumption that challenge motivates students, is just one of the possible myriad ways to think about running a class…and it’s one that is frankly at odds with a lot of what is going on in the world where collaboration is being stressed over confrontation and the ability to work in a group to achieve objectives that exceed the talent and skill of the individual is becoming more and more important.

So what if you want to run a class in which you nurture your students into moving from their comfort zone of familiar (and boring) habits into a new kind of creative identity? Where you work to get them out of the defensive crouch typical to students who are novices in a discipline and into a stance where they are willing to realize that the solutions they have are not entirely sufficient to solve the problems the class – as a whole – faces? In other words, to a place where they are ready to really learn, rather than repeating bad habits or sharpening useless, outmoded skills?

And what if your student has an unexamined assumption that classes are supposed to be bootcamps or trials by fire and you just don’t want to play along with that macho fantasy by being turned into the evil center of the class? I signed up to be a teacher, not to play a supporting role in some teenager’s private version of The Hunger Games by providing 'challenges'.

Teaching is not just transmitting information. It matters how you run your class (and that’s why those teaching philosophies are not going away), but it also matters what students expect from classes. They need the chance to think about that, to examine their assumptions about the role of the learner (which is utterly, completely different from the role of the consumer…which society expects them to play all day, everyday). A student-centered class isn’t a euphemism for making happy customers or taking away faculty research – it’s about making sure students know that they are active participants in their education and that they have work to do…and it might be harder than some ‘challenge’ handed down from a teacher. It might actually involve learning.