Both educational developers and faculty‐artists share the same goal: significant learning. Yet effective dialogue and collaboration between the two can be undermined without the educational developer's knowledge of signature pedagogies and discipline‐specific terminology in the various disciplines of art. We examine several assumptions about artists and how these assumptions can be overcome for the benefit of educational developers, faculty‐artists, and students. To this end, we provide suggestions for generating dialogue about teaching and learning with faculty‐artists and for making these dialogues fruitful.
What Teaching Looks Like delves into higher education—the challenges faced by students, faculty, staff, and administrators alike from all variety of institution types and across campus sectors—in a way that has not been done before. By weaving together a unique collection of documentary photographs of modern teaching and learning at US colleges and universities with research-based discussion of the state of engaged learning, the book teaches readers to think through and with photographs in new ways, offering insights and perspectives with the potential to change teaching, administrative, and support practices for the better. The project not only reflects the state of how US institutions educate the next generation of thinkers and innovators, it informs what we could aspire to do as educators and reveals experiences and perspectives of today’s students in ways that are only accessible through photographs. The ultimate intent of this book is to make both faculty and administrative work visible, both to audiences internal to our colleges and universities as well as to external stakeholders and decision makers of today and tomorrow, and in doing so, understand and value this work more effectively. It is vital for those whose work is concentrated within one area to see, understand, and empathize with their colleagues from other campus sectors. It also remains necessary for those outside of higher education to visualize and understand the work that faculty, administrators, and students are engaged in day-to-day. Some decision makers continue to hold on to antiquated images and stereotypes of those who work in the education system. The images and discussion in the book challenge these outdated stereotypes.
Both educational developers and faculty-artists share the same goal: significant learning. Yet effective dialogue and collaboration between the two can be undermined without the educational developer's knowledge of signature pedagogics and discipline-specific terminology in the various disciplines ofart. We examine several assumptions about artists and how these assumptions can be overcome for the benefit of educational developers, faculty-artists, and students. To this end, we provide suggestions for generating dialogue about teaching and learning with faculty-artists and for making these dialogues fruitful. o 55 TO IMPROVE THE ACADEMY The work of faculty who teach art in the academy (for example, theater and dance, fine arts, creative writing, music) is often misunderstood by nonartist educational developers. As a result, educational developers are less likely to learn about the signature pedagogies of various artistic disciplines, as defined by Shulman (2005), and are less likely to be able to deeply or broadly support faculty-artists in their teaching and scholarship. This misunderstanding is reflected in, if not influenced by, the promulgation of artist stereotypes in popular culture. In most films, for example, artists are portrayed as self-absorbed, mentally unstable, morally suspect, and highly skeptical of institutions, the academy most of all. Such stereotypes extend to the work faculty-artists do in the classroom. We might be tempted to believe such work is unplanned and undisciplined, privileging intuition over reason (and is thus immune to assessment or evaluation and so not to be taken seriously). In the film Barfly (1987), Mickey Rourke plays a poet named Henry Chinasky, based on real-life poet Charles Bukowski, who lives in squalor and spends most of his time drinking, fighting, and writing. The film Pollock (2000) depicts the painter Jackson Pollock as essentially tortured, alcoholic, and self-destructive. Amadeus (1984) portrays Mozart as a rebellious savant with wild mood swings whose dedication to his work led to exhaustion and an early death. Many other popular films about art and artists highlight or exaggerate the darker realms of the artist's psyche-to name just a few,
This invited essay of To Improve the Academy's special feature on Creative Scholarship presents one example of creative scholarship in educational development as a forward to other forms and approaches in the special feature. This example, the Teaching and Learning Project, merges documentary and art photography traditions with faculty consultation. Following a review of the literatures of visual interpretation and instructional consultation, along with their intersection, the essay presents the Teaching and Learning Project in three ways: (1) as images, analyzed using the disciplinary grounding of the visual arts; (2) as a consultation methodology and an educational development practice; and (3) as a research project using a social science-based approach (grounded theory) exploring the experience of the subjects photographed. Finally, as a segue to the rest of the TIA special feature, this invited essay addresses the transformative nature of creative scholarship and its implications for the field of educational development.
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