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.

Revised Dossier

Gerard Brown Dossier by Gerard Brown | Make Your Own Book

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.

Grad panels, a 'circle-of-life' thing...

Mark Tansey, Triumph Over Mastery

Early December: time to look at what the grad students are up to this year.

A few years back, I wrote a little bit about grad panels, and once again I am losing sleep over them. I am doing a lot fewer this year than most as I am out on leave, but I still need to join in for a few. Going this year is odd, since i haven't been in any grad students' studios. I am part of some gray facade of higher ed this year...the committee member no one really knows.

Add this to the fact that I cannot keep straight the rituals of various schools (is this the school where we ask the candidate to leave and wherein we have the real, substantive conversation in his/her absence, or is this the school where they stay and we are awkwardly keeping comments to ourselves for a few minutes?) and I am a mostly useless committee member.

Except for one thing: I am honest and I have no stake in anyone. 

I hate committees where people know the candidate and overlook obvious shortcomings of the work or the thesis. I fear ever being that teacher, one who has formed an attachment to a student that precludes clear-eyed evaluation of the work. 

I did three meetings in a week, and I've seen too much of that. When the work is good, it makes you play the downer, pointing out some way in which it could be better. When it's less than good, you are the one whose impatience at being a part of the conversation colors the whole meeting.

All of which leads me to ask, why do we do these panels this way? When I was in grad school, a students could select a panel of more-or-less total strangers (you know, the sort of people who might go see shows?) They didn't talk about the work as though you were going to revise anything; they talked about it as a thing that was done and sitting in front of them that needed to be figured out in 40 minutes. They didn't want to make better, they wanted to understand what it was. It was the best thing in the world - you saw how the work played to people who hadn't been listening to you figure it out for 15 weeks. They would never see you again. They told you it was great. Or that it wasn't great. Most of the time, they split the vote. 

As I get farther and farther in my teaching career, I get more and more clarity about what I can and cannot hope to do as a teacher. I see a lot of my colleagues trying to change lives. I hear a lot of conversations about teaching predicated on recalling 'that teacher' who changed your life. 

I have had great teachers. I have learned a lot, and I'm grateful to the many formal teachers I have had, and to the colleagues I learned from. But I can't get on board with the mystical, charismatic teaching ideal. What I see every time I sit down with students shows me that that's a bad idea. What I want to see is work.

Gever Tulley on 5 dangerous things for kids | Video on TED.com

We're liking this one...I hope to get up the nerve to do these things with my kids.

What makes a critic?

This is a perennial debate and one that I have tried to clip comments on and keep track of. I have to say this latest exchange (between the Guardian's Johnathon Jones and Minnesota Orchestra's Sam Bergman) is kinda disappointing. Perhaps it's because it happens in blogs, where so much is truncated or overly general to start with. (How's that for general?) But perhaps it's because neither of them appears to be advancing an especially interesting argument.

Jones seems to think that trusting his gut and being loud is enough. Bergman is content to point out that it may not be in this polyphonic age. But neither of them seems to get at the reason there might be criticism in the first place - because art and music and theater and cinema and all manner of cultural production are things to talk about. The most interesting things in such conversations are often said by those who are deeply knowledgeable of the history and traditions of the area, invested in maintaining a high level of quality (or in attaining one), and thoughtful and attentive about the specific work under discussion. That doesn't discount the possibility that a newcomer to the conversation might have something insightful to say, or that someone from outside its usual boundaries mightn't have something to offer. I think those things happen all the time (that's why I talk to anybody who wants to talk about art). But those are unusual events that depend on an individual's sensitivity and eloquence, whereas knowledge, investment, and attentiveness are skills that can be sharpened.

I am interested in circulating one idea of Jones - in his blog posting he writes:

The reason so much average or absolutely awful art gets promoted is that no one seems to understand what criticism is; if nothing is properly criticised [sic], mediocrity triumphs.

This is an interesting notion. One that hints at a 'proper' way to criticize art that could be beneficial to artists (it wouldn't be construed as mere opinion) as well as audiences (who suddenly have a responsible role in making art better by criticizing it).

For a few years, I've taught graduate seminars in criticism. Every time I teach a studio class, I stress to my students that its' not enough to make your own art - you must contribute to the discussion of others (that, to me is how art is made out of mere images and objects...but talking about them as if they were important). I would be interested in anyone else's thoughts on what constitutes "proper" criticism...

On Recieved Wisdom

I read a lot of students' writing and patterns start to emerge. One of the most prevalent is the confusion between real experience and received wisdom. Almost every semester, there's a class discussion in which we need to separate what it's like to see a picture on a website or a book or a magazine from seeing it at a gallery, or a museum, or in a studio or someone's home. There is always that student who sees these things as fundamentally similar, and I'm always a little confused about that. Hughes is talking about his relation to Abstract Expressionism, but what he said was immediately applicable to the German art that was so hot when I was in school in the 80s.

So I wanted to share a passage from an essay by Robert Hughes that helped clarify this problem some years ago.

Thirty years ago, Abstract Expressionism was pretty well a mandatory world style. We in Australia looked at it with awe. The bottle in which its messages washed up on our shores (since the paintings themselves did not cross the Pacific) was the magazine ARTnews. Its hagiographic tone was clear. Except for the titans of the history books, whose work we hadn't seen either - from Michelangelo and Leonardo down to Picasso and Matisse - we had never read the kinds of claims made for any artist that Harold Rosenberg or Thomas Hess made for Barnett Newman and Willem de Kooning. They were grand enough to stifle aesthetic dissent. Only contact with the originals could have tested them, and we could not see the originals. Thus, although we didn't know it, we were in a situation of man American artists outside New York in the 1960s - flat on our backs, waiting for the missionary.

The copy of ARTnews would arrive and we would dissect it, cutting out the black-and-white reproductions and pinning them on the studio wall. One was, say a Newman. You had just read one of Thomas Hess's discourses on how Newman's vertical zip was Adam, or the primal act of division of light from darkness, or the figure of the unnamable Yahweh himself. How could you disagree? On what could you base your trivial act of colonial dissent? A mere reproduction, two inches by three? But Yahweh doesn't show his face in reproductions. He shows it only in paintings. And if you got to see the paintings, what if you didn't see it? Did that mean that his terrible and sublime visage was not there either? Of course not; it meant that you had a bad eye; or that Yahweh doesn't show himself to goyim in the South Pacific. And since it is difficult for the young and otherwise uninitiated to avoid, still less be skeptical about, the language in which peak experiences are offered to them, you were apt to assume that it was your own unpreparedness or sheer obtuseness prevented you from seeing the deity that lurked within Newman's zip or Rothko 's fuzzy rectangle.

...which is a round about way of retelling the emperor-has-no-clothes story, but not just that. Images are used in arguments as evidence, to be persuasive. If they're included, it's because they're persuasive...a truism that's too seldom open to critique. What I think young artists writing about their work in relation to others sometimes forget is that the image is evidence in someone else's argument, not the argument itself. To cite a painting or sculpture (or whatever) without having really looked at it is too often to try to bring, whole cloth, the value of that object to your writing. And how can you really look at it without, well, really looking at it? And to what extent are we really looking at things when what we see is what another writer has written? Or what a photographer has framed, excluding all else?

Art surprises us. It is, in spite of the cliche, in some fundamental way, both window and mirror. We get a view to something else while the art works simultaneously tells us something about where we stand (and whether we are funny looking or have bad hair). Seeing in art what you're told by historians and critics should be as much a cause for alarm as for celebration. It's great to have the validation that comes with having your unfocused, unspoken impressions converted into language, but it's an act of robbery if that language gets between you and the object you're interested in.

Works Cited

Hughes, Robert. “The Decline of the City of Mahagonny.” Nothing if not critical: selected essays on art and artists. New York: Pengun, 1990. p.5