Modernism Across the Arts

Imagine a spacetime bubble of collaborative creativity you enter regularly, where everyday constraints are suspended.

You have the luxury to converse with other faculty about some aspect of your pedagogical practice that’s been nagging at you for a while, which you have yet to figure out. I had taught Modernism across the Arts for several years when I applied for the Bacca fellowship, and my idea was to come up with a comprehensive final assignment that would require group work, a project (perhaps) involving technology that would enable students to appreciate even more the dazzling array of artworks – literature, painting, music, dance, film, sculpture – we study under the broad umbrella of “modernism.” What kind of project would yield an indelible outcome, a sort of crowning of the students’ learning throughout the semester? I imagined something that would encompass the arc of the semester’s engagement with various materials, but recreated in the students’ somewhat idiosyncratic manner, reflective of each participant’s unique experience. I was ready to invest time and energy in learning a software we might use (although I had some reservations about this aspect) that would allow students to produce something they could share beyond the classroom. But what could that be?

What I enjoyed most about the monthly meetings with the wonderful Nan Mulleneaux and the other fellows was the partly structured, partly free time we enjoyed, in a space that felt conducive to sharing concerns and questions, experimenting with ideas, picking people’s brains, and above all marveling at the creative pedagogical possibilities that emerge from the encounter among minds attuned to one another but also intently focused on their specific pedagogical-enhancement project. I remember conversations about rubrics and grading, the challenges of class discussion, balancing creativity with rigor and robust scholarly standards, the use of ChatGPT and other technologies, improvising in the classroom while making sure one delivered the foundational knowledge, preparing and overpreparing, varieties of frustration, adapting teaching to different styles of learning... A colleague brought in the idea of collage, yet another was researching possibilities for an assignment that would ask students to annotate a text, adding layers of complexity to their engagement with sources through hyperlinks. A colleague who was working on a game about evolutionary biology inspired me to think of rules, improvised play, and visuals in the classroom.

Another fellow regularly teaches a workshop on protocols of conversation and attention—no syllabus. I imagined awkward silences and a sense of wasted time; I felt the horror of empty space, horror vacui. Without a syllabus? I asked incredulously, unable to imagine how I could possibly give up the treasure trove of materials on my syllabi. There’s so much to read, watch, listen to, discover, learn… Only the conversation topics the students bring in, what they learn through their interaction, including to listen and to read one another… I was intrigued and directed a puzzled smile at the objects we had each chosen from Nan’s collection as a visual symbol of our pedagogy: his, an empty bag; mine, the picture of a water pitcher or flower vase that, from a different angle, looked like a glove. What emerged from his updates was the idea of the classroom as a dynamic space shaped by the individuality of each participant. I still have a “note to self” scribbled in my records: structure: all bound to the same rules // play: everyone’s involvement shapes the class dynamic // instructor’s role: cultivate the participants’ self-awareness through reflection on what’s going on in the classroom and the different modalities of learning.

What my modernism class needed evolved, in my mind, under the influence of these conversations. Each session included time for reflective writing, which gave me the chance to gather my thoughts. I still wanted an assignment that would involve student collaboration, but participants had to enjoy some freedom as well and the opportunity for new ideas to emerge from their interactions; technology could be generative, but at least equally valuable appeared to me the gift of presence, the power of full speech, of learning through conversation, practice, and self-reflection; I grew less suspicious of grading rubrics, but ended up favoring clear guidelines that would help students complete assignments and assess their own and their peers’ work; reflecting on the image I had intuitively picked (the pitcher/vase/glove that represented modernism’s investment in formal innovation and evoked its playful collages of incongruous objects), I realized that history had to gain a more prominent role in my seminar, so I would ask my students to read throughout the semester one newspaper  from the period associated with modernism; and while giving up course materials is anathema to me, I came to acknowledge that it’s crucial to build in some breathing space on the syllabus, sessions for which there’s no new material, that we dedicate to revisiting what we have already discussed, reconfiguring it differently, putting a different spin on it, and opening up the material towards new vistas students might explore beyond the course framework.

The Bacca group sessions concluded with a public sharing event, an opportunity to open up our laboratory of ideas and experimentation to students, other faculty and staff. I was pleased to see both what the other fellows ended up with, and to share my own new assignment. I called it the Modernist Café. There are four such cafés over the course of the semester, during which we return in time to a day of the students’ choice: a café host sets up the classroom space; everyone contributes news items and gossip to the fictional newspaper someone is designing for that day, copies of which are scattered on the tables as we arrive; 3-4 students read their parts of a dramatic dialog they’ve co-written in the voice of selected artists, in which they revisit some of the artefacts we’ve analyzed in the course unit we’re just concluding; this ensures that there’s a script for about half of the class time, but also space for unstructured conversations generated by the staged dialog and the newspapers in front of us. I taught the seminar in a new iteration this past spring, and, judging from the students’ reflections on their learning (which they had to submit in two installments) it has been a highly enjoyable experience for everyone involved.

I am grateful to Nan and the other fellows for their generosity and creativity.

IMAGE CREDIT: Corina Stan

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Corina Stan