I keep coming back to this letter to the editor published in n+1, Fall 2023 edition:
"I teach drawing, printmaking, and artist-book classes to students who declare, before even trying, that they cannot draw. After thirty years of teaching, I think I know what they’re really saying: “I do not have time for the slow process of learning drawing skills. And drawing does not matter anymore. Please don’t expect much from me.” It takes semesters of working with them (if they give me that much before decamping to something more “relevant”) to activate the idea of drawing as an exercise in observation, embodied knowledge building, and visual communication instead of a means of virtuosic rendering."
Now, there's a lot to unpack here, and thankfully, not all of it feels this dire for me. I am always fascinated to hear what my counterparts in other artistic fields are experiencing. This art instructor seems to be saying that their students:
- lack grit
- do not see the value in developing fundamental skills
- are in school to get a job, rather than to broaden themselves
I am coupling this last one with an apt quote from a former colleague I heard over beers last semester: "our students are at the university to major in JOB"...said with chagrin and eliciting groans around the table, of course.
While I do have a lower attrition rate in my flute studio than this art instructor seems to imply from their drawing class, attrition did increase during the pandemic years as students realized they didn't actually want to do the work of being a music major. *Insert various pandemic-themed excuses here.* And while my current students do seem genuinely interested in becoming better musicians, their unevenly developed minds struggle to see past "is this going to be on the test" thinking to assess the universal skills they are developing on the instrument. I struggle to get them to explore applicability in new contexts (for instance, we just worked on quiet, high register playing in the 2nd movement of the Poulenc, so how can you now apply this to the 2nd movement of the Hindemith?, that sort of thing). How about you all, fair readers? Similar struggles? A different hot take on said struggles?
I have long identified a lack of critical thinking and application skills in my young college students; these skills don't seem to be emphasized in the highly quantified, standardized testified, world of pre-college public school. My antidote for that has been to very clearly and repeatedly a) encourage a thought process in lessons which allows them to practice thinking this way and b) explain my pedagogy to the hilt as I am teaching, which can have the effect of defensiveness, or a certain sense of apology for requiring rigor. I think these methods have had some good effect, but still leave a gap between my prompting students to turn on this part of their brains and their automatically doing it (or more ideally, keeping that part of their brains turned on).
I have been buoyed by a recent visit Zara Lawler made to our school last week, in which she performed an excellent concert, gave a very practical talk about fundraising for creative projects, and also led students through a music and movement workshop. You can watch a grainy, poorly mic'd version of it here for however long it remains up. If you do (with a good pair of headphones), you'll notice that she largely left out the "why" portion of what she taught--she simply taught it. There were exercises in which she played and we got to depict what we heard with our physical movements, she moved and we got to play something on our instruments to depict her movements, and then we played some lines from her repertoire and collectively slotted out movements to correspond. There was no "here's how you can apply this later" or "here's why this is good for you" kind of talk. My evangelizing in lessons about why my students should appreciate what I'm showing them was entirely absent. She just showed us how she does the thing. As a Very Tired Middle Aged Teacher [TM], I found this exhilarating.
We're in early stages post-visit, which always elicits the greatest amount of enthusiasm from my students, but what I have observed so far is promising: absent the spoon feeding, they seem to be digesting it on their own. And they're not necessarily thinking about application, but they do seem to have been stricken (in the best possible way) by the extreme novelty of it all. How the experience will feed them, creatively or intellectually, in the long term remains to be seen, but it's swirling around up there in their heads, of this I feel confident.
The question then arises, for myself, and perhaps for some of you, too: what if I took some of the defensiveness out of my teaching and just laid it out there, for the students to do with what they wish? Perhaps this requires a tapering off process after first training them to think critically, or perhaps they already have the power to do that and I'm just not giving them enough credit. And what if I could just live with the possibility that not every scrap of information I feed them ends up being utilized in future weeks of practice? Could I just teach and trust them to decide what to do with it, and how would that change lessons, studio class, juries, and recitals?
In my obsession to ensure students understand the importance of every morsel of knowledge, I am, ironically, playing right into a certain sense of college as job training, even as I abhor the sentiment when it feels like a stumbling block to caring about artistry. I suspect there is a middle ground, in which we offer up the information they need both to develop as musicians and earn a living, but let them do what they want with it and reap the benefits or suffer the consequences.
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