LiberalArtsOnline Volume 5, Number 9
September 2005
In August, our author described how his college combines liberal arts and professional education in its new business program. This month’s essay continues this theme but examines a different discipline—the fine and performing arts. The authors first explore the significant and varied roles that the arts and creative studies play in society. They then illustrate ways that Southern Oregon University’s fine and performing arts program provides students with a "dress rehearsal" for life by integrating intellectual and practical values. Have you seen other programs that connect liberal arts education and professional training? How have they accomplished this? Please write and share your experiences with us.
--Kathleen S. Wise, Editor
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Dress Rehearsals for Life: The Arts at the Intersection of Liberal Education and Professional Training
by Edwin Battistella, Dean, School of Arts & Letters
Mada Morgan, Assistant Professor, Department of English & Writing
Deborah Rosenberg, Associate Professor, Department of Theatre Arts
Southern Oregon University
Each summer at Southern Oregon University, we receive lists of the students interested in various fine and performing arts majors. However, by fall, typically twice as many students have enrolled in our departments as initially registered. At first this difference between the sign up and the show up puzzled us. We think we’ve figured it out though. Some students who attend the early registration don’t tell their parents what they are planning to major in because they are worried about having to answer the question, "What are you going to do with a degree in theatre?" Or art. Or music. Or writing. Or video. Our students shouldn’t be worried about that. The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts overall employment in arts, entertainment, and recreation will grow by 28% nationally (497,000 new jobs) by 2012. In comparison, total employment in all categories is expected to grow by just 14.8% in the same period. The fine and performing arts play important economic, cultural, civic, and spiritual roles in our society. A good fine and performing arts program will prepare students for these roles by providing them with an education both grounded in the liberal arts and enhanced by practical experiences of various kinds. We propose that the arts and creative studies offer special opportunities to institutions to integrate liberal education, the disciplines of the traditional arts, and the ethos of the workplace.
Culture and the arts mean business for everyone nationally, and this sector of the economy has been a particular success of southern Oregon. In fact, when the Oregonian recently analyzed the economic regions of the state, it described southern Oregon as anchored in retirement, retail, and tourism, all of which are intricately connected to the arts. And for southern Oregon, no entity is more central to tourism and retirement than the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which attracts more than 90,000 visitors from outside the region. In 2002, Shakespeare Festival visitors spent about $25 million in direct expenditures during the nine-month season. By comparison, during the full year of 2002, cultural tourists to all of Portland spent $89 million. The festival’s economic impact in 2002 was $129 million (2.5 times its budget). In addition to the nonprofit area, there is a thriving for-profit arts industry in southern Oregon. The 2000 U.S. Census report found that taxable arts and entertainment organizations in the Medford-Ashland area generated $29 million in annual sales. So, our incoming students needn’t be bashful about letting their parents and families know what they are majoring in.
There are certainly other reasons for students to be interested in the arts and creative studies besides their economic viability. The cultural importance of the arts has been affected by the age we live in. Increasingly, we find ourselves living in a time of aesthetic and media choices, from the amount of information and entertainment we get to options for our appearance, environment, style, and career. When our generation was growing up, there were only four channels on the television, there were no casual Fridays, there was just one type of coffee, and the only people with tattoos were sailors. Today, things are much different. A greater percentage of a family’s income is spent today on aesthetic and consumer items than ever before. And the arts and culture are being used to anchor local economies in a way that malls and factories were used in the past. In order to navigate this world, students need to understand the position of the arts in the economy, in society, and in history.
Art and culture also build community. The nonprofit arts sector and local arts organizations are engines of community development and sustainability. The skills and relationships that are built in art festivals, community theatre, city bands, and even book groups and writing workshops engage citizens in new ways of thinking and relating together. These relationships add value to everything from United Way drives to city planning and emergency response.
Finally, of course, the arts and culture help individuals and communities find their way in the world—to escape, to remember, to celebrate, to grieve, to challenge, and to experiment. The arts reveal and shape our national mood. From military marching bands to the theatre of the oppressed, we use the arts to reflect and inspire and to persuade and teach. After the September 11 attacks, the arts were a way of bringing people together. Our campus memorial in October of 2001 included the ringing of a bell that a music faculty member made from firefighting equipment. And New Yorkers broke the tension when Mayor Giuliani went on Saturday Night Live to tell them, "It’s okay to laugh again."
The inspirational, civic, and cultural reasons for choosing an arts major may be more important in fact than economic concerns, and certainly they are the key appeal to many artists and students. However, when we explain what we do to parents and policy-makers, we often lead off with the economic point. If we don’t articulate the economic role of the arts, we may not be able to sustain the other three goals. A program that merges all of these values will integrate curricula and internships with practical and intellectual values, while keeping the liberal arts firmly in sight.
The fine and performing arts curriculum builds on the foundation provided by the liberal arts, and especially the humanities: writing, art, theatre, music, and video are impossible without literature, history, language, and cultural studies. For students to understand how to write and perform to audiences, for example, they need to have knowledge about the complex workings of human psychology; historical context; and the nature of politics, economics, and religion as forces that shape behavior. As the former chair of the Art Department liked to remind colleagues, many video games and adventure films are based on a few recurring plots similar to those in The Odyssey, Beowulf, and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. A serious knowledge of literature is essential, he says, to animators and filmmakers if they are going to understand the history of their craft.
A liberal arts education is intended to guide students to explore, synthesize, and apply the knowledge and perspectives all citizens need. In both theatre and writing, our university’s curricula are designed to parallel this principle. A student’s work is organized so that he or she must explore different paths within a major. This often has interesting results.
Many students are initially attracted to theatre, for example, because they want to be actors. But all theatre students are required to take such courses as Stagecraft, Costume Fundamentals, Theatre Foundations, Script Analysis, Playreading, and Stage Lighting. Exploration of these new areas sometimes leads students to discover new strengths and interests. In addition, students must complete six to twelve hours of a practicum or internship during their course of study. This integrates practical learning in a professional theatre environment.
The writing curriculum also emphasizes practical exploration and synthesis. Students come to us as dedicated readers and aspiring creative writers. As they learn about genre, history, theory, language, and rhetoric, they learn new ways to adapt the world to their interests through technical writing, grant writing, and the publishing field. Our professional writing option, for example, requires upper division work in Professional and Technical Writing, Grantwriting and Workplace Literacy, Community Engagement Writing, and the Business of Writing, as well as a practicum or internship experience.
While it’s important for the curriculum to introduce different perspectives and paths, classroom interactions must also encourage these explorations. We need to help our students build the bridge between liberal arts and practical learning by combining lecture and lab, theory and application, abstract ethics and personal experience. This is done through the content of classes and through their management.
One important step toward this is inviting guests to demonstrate key aspects of the curriculum, and to provide practical perspectives on ideas raised in coursework. In theatre, for example, costume designers, shop supervisors, tailors, drapers, and lighting and sound designers from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival visit classes to explain the art and the business of theatre. In writing, a diverse group of technical writers, editors, publishers, and nonprofit managers bring to life the concepts of discourse community, audience, purpose, and persuasion. The professional writing curriculum enables students to make the transition from seeing writing as only a creation of their minds to regarding it as an engagement with an audience, a purpose, and a community.
In both theatre and writing, students learn by doing—by taking part in theatre productions; participating in SPEWS, our web journal for English and writing students; producing an annual literary journal called the West Wind Review; publishing in research journals; and writing grants for community projects. These experiences provide discrete opportunities for students to move outside the classroom to work with audiences beyond their instructor and peers. This gives students a chance to learn and practice organization, teamwork, responsibility, and creativity, and to experience deadlines and budgets.
Internships and community experiences are the last part of the bridge between liberal arts and practical learning. They are "dress rehearsals for life." In writing, students intern at Ashland Creative, the Ashland Gallery Association, the Schneider Museum of Art, the Ashland Independent Film Festival, Southern Oregon Public Television, Caveat Press, RiverWood Books, Ruby Sky Publishing, Story Line Press, White Cloud Press, and the Southern Oregon University Publications Office. In theatre, students intern with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Britt Music Festival, the Craterian Ginger Rogers Theatre, Oregon Cabaret Theatre, and other performance venues.
We track our successes anecdotally but we also have formal processes in place to monitor how we are doing. These include assessment by both the instructor of record and the site supervisor, and a self-reflection by the student. In English and writing, we use Blackboard technology to allow students to report on and share their internship experiences with peers. In theatre, professionals from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival direct performances, evaluate student work, and observe auditions to prescreen students. In addition, we try to track the impact of our internships. We ask what value they add for our students, what value they add for the partner organizations, and what value they add to the University’s range of partnerships.
How do we know we’re succeeding? We know we’re succeeding when our student technical writers win national competitions and when our student grant writers receive funding. Students in the grant writing class must submit a community grant. In recent years, they have received funding for projects supporting the Friends of the Animal Shelter, the Grants Pass Performing Arts Center, the Impact Theater, the Rogue Community College Dental Program, the Salvation Army, and the YMCA of Medford.
We know we are succeeding when we have students like Robert Felthousen, a library assistant at Rogue Community College. Robert’s story "Questionnaire," a tribute to Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., was published in the North American Review and his grant for the dental assistance program was funded by Rogue Community College. He also presented at the National Undergraduate Literature Conference in 2004. His liberal arts background has enabled him to effectively blend his interests in literature, research, fiction, and professional writing.
We know we are succeeding when we have students like Angi Hill. Angi originally intended to be an actor, but she found her interest in costume design. The liberal arts aspects of her theatre curriculum helped her understand all the choices available to her. Angi had always liked to sew and had become adept at altering clothes to fit her. Her theatre experience gave her the knowledge, perspectives, and skills to succeed as a professional designer. She designed Southern Oregon University’s production of the Laramie Project, interned in costume construction at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, worked there for a year after graduation on a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and then moved to Hollywood to work in film. Recently we hired Angi as a visiting costumer in the Theatre Arts Department, bringing a touch of Hollywood to our costume shop. We know we’ve succeeded when the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Hollywood designers tell us, "Send us more students like Angi Hill."
So, how do the fine and performing arts and liberal learning come together? A liberal arts philosophy guides students to explore, synthesize, and make the world fit their interests, across majors and within majors. The integration of learning and doing in the classroom builds skills in manageable and managed steps. Practical experiences, blended with theory and history, provide skills that allow students to contribute meaningfully in professional settings. Professional perspectives that bring the community into the classroom help students to understand the connections between liberal learning and what they might do for a living. Internships and practica are final dress rehearsals for life, synthesizing what has come before. And assessment and documentation of students and the program complete the circle, allowing us to grow and show what we are doing.
Southern Oregon University is succeeding at blending the liberal arts and professional practice, but there is more to do. We must develop sustainable mechanisms to identify needs and opportunities in the arts community that allow students to participate in more entrepreneurial and in-depth skill building activities. We can better document the learning that goes on in these activities, especially the coming together of liberal education, fine and performing arts expertise, and engagement with practical tasks. And we need to promote and leverage the results of the activities to our students, faculty, and other campus constituents, and especially to the larger community. As we are able to accomplish these new goals, we will situate the arts and creative studies squarely at the intersection of liberal education and practical training. And we will be creating new models of interdisciplinary learning and engagement for the twenty-first century.
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Direct responses to lao@wabash.edu. We will forward comments to the authors.
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The comments published in LiberalArtsOnline reflect the opinions of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the Center of Inquiry or Wabash College. Comments may be quoted or republished in full, with attribution to the author(s), LiberalArtsOnline, and the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College.
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Final Call for Responses to "Declining by Degrees"
In an upcoming issue of LiberalArtsOnline, we will publish reactions to the PBS documentary "Declining by Degrees: Higher Education at Risk." The program, and the companion book of the same name, raised difficult questions about the state of higher education in this country. In an effort to encourage conversations about these challenges, the Center of Inquiry would like to share your thoughts on these issues. To submit a response for consideration or for more information about "Declining by Degrees," review this page.
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