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 View Digital Media
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.
The Experiences of Native American Students in Higher Education: A Narrative Inquiry View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Christina Alexander
This study examines the experiences and achievements of Native and Indigenous students in traditional institutions of higher education. While Native and Indigenous in traditional institutions of higher education continue to lag behind their non-native peers in graduation rates, the study explores their experiences, communicating in their own words in the community, with the purpose of identifying unique challenges and crafting solutions to improve outcomes. The research is based on a qualitative analysis of written interviews of 100 Native and Indigenous participants with tribal affiliations and over 18 years old who have attended and completed a course of study at a traditional institution of higher education. The narrative data were interpreted through qualitative analysis and thematic extraction. The findings suggest that both positive and negative experiences exist, and support systems can be used to bolster Native student achievement and success. Positive indicators include increased social support and a sense of belonging, while negative indicators include social disorientation, lack of access to resources, lack of adequate academic preparation, and lack of faculty and staff support. The study concludes that Native students in traditional institutions of higher education experience a disorienting dilemma. Increasing adequate academic preparation, access to resources and faculty/staff support systems improves performance as does creating a sense of belonging to the outside community.
Techno-optimism: The Procrustean Bed of Architectural Education View Digital Media
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.
