Probing Pedagogy
Asynchronous Session
Traveling Beyond the Foremost Centers of Florence and Rome to Study Renaissance Art : Teaching Art History as a Humanities Course in Arezzo, Italy
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Deborah Cibelli
The paper discusses teaching an art history course dedicated to the Renaissance to American students for five weeks in Arezzo, Italy. The focus upon art from Arezzo make the curriculum unique for studies of Italian Renaissance Art as Florence, Rome and other historical centers are less central to the discussion. Topics focus on Arezzo's Etruscan heritage; the association that Petrarch had to the city-state; the role of St. Francis throughout Tuscany; and the lives of Aretine artists such as Spinello Aretino and Giorgio Vasari. Vasari's frescoes, created for his house, has imagery that celebrates other master artists from the city. The complex iconographic subject matter complements his "Lives of the Artists" or "Vite", a primary source for the biographies of Renaissance artists. A discussion of the course content may provide a model for a course on the visual arts and humanities and for the study of Renaissance art from other regional centers in Italy.
Negotiating Education for a New Humanity: The Prophetic Call and the Oral Storytelling Tradition
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kelly Van Andel
In an era dominated by the powerful rationalisms of science-technology and economics-commerce, those of us connected to and champions of the humanities must accept the call to serve as prophets. In other words, we must speak in the unsettling spaces of interdisciplinarity, diversity, and globalization and remind people how to be human in light of the past and how to become human amidst the domineering forces of the present. The oral storytelling tradition and the work of Native American authors serve as potential guides. Together, they illustrate how the wisdom of the past can travel, transform, and renegotiate not only what it means to be human in the twenty-first century but the place of the humanities in the university and the world. To explore such, this paper/presentation first examines the adaptability of the oral storytelling tradition. Second, it considers how Native American authors such as Joy Harjo and Leslie Marmon Silko have used the oral storytelling in their work to help them chart and negotiate their place in the Western world and in the English language. Finally, it posits that the versatility of the oral storytelling tradition can serve as a model for helping us speak as prophets and chart new pathways across disciplines and educational modalities.
Techno-optimism: The Procrustean Bed of Architectural Education
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Harris Dimitropoulos
This paper examines the effects of techno-optimism on design studies and students today, as evidenced during the past fifteen years of architectural studio instruction. It is about the continuing and inexorable encroachment of digital design media into the architectural design studio and the effect this has on young minds. The introduction of the current, digital paradigm is covered in the introduction along with the reasons behind this shift. As a result, students have a difficult time connecting their architectural representations to the everyday, embodied inhabitation of spaces. A brief presentation of teaching practices and courses that in the past promoted an embodied understanding of the environment follows. Students understood space, function, and inhabitation a lot less after the abandonment of these courses. In architecture, for instance, students cannot describe in drawing what they encounter in the world, nor can they integrate their own experiences in their design decisions. Today, we cannot insist on returning to previous modes of instruction, but we can make the effort to invent ways within the prevalent media to inspire and to sensitize students to an anthropocentric view of architecture. The paper concludes with a series of examples regarding the re-introduction of critical seeing, thinking and representing with prompts that allow for the use of digital media as tools and as extensions of human cognition and not as goals in and of themselves.
