Get back in the box
For Spring 2015, I am honored to have joined the Visual and Performing Arts faculty at Luther, working with a Foundations level course. In the campus convocation this morning, our honored guest Dr. Carol Geary Schneider, spoke of "integrative - applied - adaptive" learning experiences which allow graduates of the liberal or liberal arts experience to engage with diversity, ethical questions, to think "outside the box", to collaborate in their lives beyond the campus.
Hear hear! (and here too, for Luther College places great emphasis on these questions and considerations for their students), but I do of course, have one suggested edit, which I will continue to advocate for, and that is to bring that "outside the box" thinking back in the box. Make the creative, flexible, integrative, adaptive, experimental, explorations that are considered "outside" back in, create sustainable creative practice in every person so we have to create a new metaphor for the even more innovative and exhilarating practices which would replace this now rather dated "box". Whatever my language nit-picking, her message was solid and important.
We cannot educate for the past, we must create thinkers for the future. In the arts, this is a constant conversation. Why would we want to make what fits into existing structures and systems? This leaves us filling in (beautifully, with strength) existing forms. We want to create new shapes (we don't want boxes anymore!), because there always are and forever will be new problems "unscripted problems" she called them. She challenges educators to ask the enduring questions, but to also ask these hot off the press adults "What's on your mind?".
In the Movement Fundamentals studio (and important element in the Body of Water performance, and in my interdisciplinary Visual Thinking course, we are striving for this "human" centered approach (before the tradition, question, form are allowed to "give shape” to the ideas of the student herself). A beautiful statement worth repeating which has supported the evolution of my Foundation curriculum in particular, and which I introduced to the MF studio practice this evening, is to create an environment where we "turn the teaching from the art itself to the artist who is human, fallible and an ever changing entity". The MF practice, also employing an interdisciplinary approach to creative practice, encourages us to broaden the question to “What’s on your mind and in your body?”
Drawing connections to the continuing projects of Bridge and thinking of the J Term experience of DRS with our Luther College interns - bright, shining students exploring science and the arts (each a dual major in Dance/Chemistry, Biology/Dance), "integrative - applied - adaptive" rolls easily off the tongue and onto the page. The DRS studio practice attempts to engage in the ideas of life, living, nature, and human experience (including all the wonders of the waterfalls, ocean floors, as well as wild berry Skittles, sneakers that light up when you walk, cars that talk and x-ray vision to watch an embryo swimming around in a uterus), to generate thought and work both. We are doing it, we are in the box. We are, as Michel de Certeau, who referred to embedding creativity in walking and cooking as the "art of doing", doing. It was to him we looked to for our Foundations “convocation”, to turn the lens back onto ourselves from day one (Ka-pow! What’s on your mind?).
Equipped, freed, slightly unsettled (balance is boring, just like boxes) and yet invigorated with these questions, their own bodies, minds, and support from all of us, these bright shinies will emerge on the other side of these experiences more aware of their “21st century contribution to the global community”, more confident to face these "unscripted problems" which await them. I for one, hope that this line of inquiry becomes gloriously quotidian, just another part of the sustainable creative practice they begin here (Hear hear!), then we can marvel, and dive in.
As President Carlson offered following this morning’s service, “what a way to begin”. Hear her indeed.
- Sarah
