Thoughtful Design: I believe professors should heed the advice often given to educators at the primary and secondary level and “begin with the end in mind,” [from Steven Covey’s (2004) “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”]. This means that teachers should determine what students should be able to know and do at the end of the course and build an encompassing conceptual framework upon that sound foundation. Put simply, the course designer must develop a set of outcomes and objectives. The objectives state what the instructor intends for students to learn during the course. The outcomes are a set of parallel statements that indicate what the students should have learned by the time the course is completed. Objectives shape instruction, while outcomes shape assessment.
At the college or university level, course outcomes and objectives should be clearly stated on the syllabus and should be referenced frequently throughout the course, particularly in relation to any given assignment. If the assignment cannot be directly linked to a course objective, it should not be assigned. Assessment, too, should specifically and directly assess the course outcomes and objectives.
Balance: In the disciplines of visual media and visual art, many courses occur in a studio setting, where students receive hands-on instruction and experience with the creation of visual media or artworks. My ideal visual media production or studio arts curriculum would be balanced between practice, research, and writing. In this ideal setting, the specific practice of a discipline or medium—including demonstration, guided studio work, and independent work in the studio or in the field, should make up approximately 50% of total hours devoted to a course. Research (including working with the assigned textbooks or class field trips) and writing should make up another 25%, with the remaining 25% dedicated to discussion, critique, and assessment. This diverges somewhat from the norm of many studio classes, where there is frequently a negligible amount of research and writing and few written assessments. Especially in the research-driven university climate of today, I feel that it is very important for students to develop a supportive conceptual framework for their production of visual media/visual art, to be able to write and speak intelligently about their practice, and to be held accountable to academic performance standards comparable to other disciplines in the humanities.
Research: this informs the student’s practice. Students should seek out precedents for the work they intend to create, asking and answering questions such as: Who has done work like this before you did? How was this work done? What were the specific techniques and materials used to accomplish this work? How are the principles and elements of art (harmony, balance, contrast, etc…) evident in the work?
Writing: in visual art, it’s typical for artists to create an Artist’s Statement, but these are all too often unnecessarily enigmatic, abstract, or simply just examples of bad writing. In my opinion, a well-written Artist’s Statement should clearly state—in grammatically correct, logical language—what the artist intended to accomplish and what the work means to the artist. If artists cannot speak intelligently, clearly, and meaningfully about their work, it leaves the field wide open for critics, art historians, and others to impose their own opinions, meanings, and messages. Those who work with visual media should also be able to write coherently about their subject in general, completing research-based writing assignments to the standards held in other humanities courses. We must never be content to limit our standards of performance to the creation of visual works alone, but must constantly strive to meet the same expectations found in any other academic department.
Practice: of course, in a studio-based class the expectation is that the majority of time will be spent on the practice of the medium. All practice activities should be demonstrably linked to the course outcomes and objectives. Practice can include demonstration of processes and techniques, but most of the time should be hands-on for the students, with the instructor present to guide and support as necessary. Practice also includes the hours students spend working on their own in completing assignments.
Assessment: in a visual media/visual arts course assessment could include three different modalities:
Demonstration: if a given process or procedure is important to the course outcomes, students can be assessed on their ability to demonstrate the process or procedure correctly.
Written Tests: in any given discipline there are key vocabulary terms, basic principles, historical information, theories, and other types of information that might be covered in the students’ assigned readings and discussed in class. At the college or university level it is reasonable to expect students to be able to read and understand their assigned readings independently, to take notes during class discussions, and to be held accountable for this knowledge on a written test. However, this must be fair. Test questions should not be intentionally obscure or vague in order to induce confusion or frustration in students. They should assess information specific to the course outcomes, not the minor details that students may or may not recall from their readings or the discussions.
Critique: in a visual arts/visual media class, perhaps the most crucial component of assessment is found in critique. Students must be specifically, deliberately taught the standards of good conduct in critique, how to give one another meaningful, respectful informed feedback, and how to back up their opinions with details and facts. Every assignment should be assessed according to a rubric, which was provided to the student at the time the assignment was initially announced—at the beginning of the semester, included on the syllabus. There should never be a mystery as to the criteria that will be used to assess the students’ work. Indeed, all assignments should be assessed with a rubric that was provided on the syllabus, not only visual works but writing, research projects, and all other work.
Assessments should be more than just a means of enabling an instructor to assign grades. These should also inform instruction. Any assessment, regardless of the type, not only reflects the student’s learning, but the instructor’s teaching. Wise instructors analyze assessment results and learn how they can improve their instruction rather than blaming the students for their lack of achievement. Especially in a situation where the entire class misses the same test question or botches the same process, the instructor should take special note and make changes to the instructional methods related to the group’s failure. Assessments can reveal trends, weak spots, or areas where students may need less instruction on material they might already have known. I don’t mean to say that every assessment is a referendum on the instructor’s competence, but providing the instructor with an introspective, evaluative look at his or her instruction is a function of any good assessment.
Fairness (grading): it should perhaps go without saying, but grading should be fair. What this means to me is that students are provided with cogent instructions and expectations regarding the performance standards of the course, which are clearly based on the course’s stated outcomes. If students meet the expectations, they should receive good grades. If not, their grades should be correspondingly lower. This kind of standards-based (criterion-referenced) grading provides the optimal conditions for fairness. I strongly oppose the anachronistic practice of comparing students to one another, giving the top-performer an A, the lowest-performer an F, and everyone else something in-between. This norm-referenced grading is inherently unfair, fosters unnecessary and unhealthy competition, and is just plain wrong. I believe that all students can achieve excellent results, and if they do, they should be rewarded for it. If that means that everyone earns an A—great. Just because someone succeeds should never mean that someone else must fail.
A well-designed rubric provides the instructor and the student with a clear understanding of what is required for the student to earn an excellent grade or why he or she might have failed an assignment. I had a very wise philosophy professor who pointed out that students should understand that an A is never guaranteed—it must be earned. The amount of time students spend on a task is much less important than the quality of the end result. Finally, any attempt at cheating and plagiarism must be met with serious consequences. In my courses I prefer to state on the syllabus that students found to have committed these violations will absolutely be given a zero on the assignment with no provision granted for re-submitting the work.
Meaningful, Relevant Content: I have sat in many classrooms where I’ve been subjected to all manner of nonsense presented under the guise of academic freedom. I realize that I might be touching the third rail of university instruction here, but students have every right to expect that a course will present them with the information it’s purported to teach. For instance, if students sign up for a course in photojournalism, the instructor should be teaching photojournalism, not psychology, religion, or attempting to indoctrinate them with his or her personal beliefs. As but one example, I was in a graduate course on research methodology in the arts, but the text selected by the instructor as an “example of scholarly research and writing” was a treatise on animal rights and anti-species-ism. Certain passages in the text featured the author’s close physical relationship with her dogs—an idea that was highly offensive to many members of the class, most particularly two Muslim students for whom most dogs are considered to be unclean and such a relationship represented a serious violation of their system of beliefs. While I remain a firm supporter of ethical treatment of animals, such evangelizing is inappropriate in a classroom where the instruction is purported to be directed towards a different topic. Indeed, when I had the audacity to voice the question, “But what does this have to do with research methods in art?” it touched off a firestorm with the professor that led to any number of unpleasant and unfortunate circumstances. The same was true in a course I taught several times while a graduate student. The course description stated that education majors would learn strategies and methods for teaching art in their classrooms, but the focus was actually on teaching for social justice. Indeed, not one textbook on the course syllabus I was originally given addressed teaching art at all. When I changed the required reading list to eliminate some of the off-topic textbooks and include more relevant materials for the teaching of art, I greatly angered the professor who had designed the course according to his own ideological agenda. I have no problem with teaching for social justice and I fully support many causes central to these ideals, but this was advertised as a course on teaching future teachers how to teach art, a core focus that was all but ignored in the course’s actual implementation.
Academic freedom, when appropriately applied, gives university instructors the ability to select the materials and methods that will best meet their instructional goals. I wholeheartedly support this ideal. But, this does not mean that a course should be allowed to become a professor’s personal pulpit for his or her particular brand of dogma at the expense of the course’s true purpose. Just as is expected of students, professors, too, should stay on point. A class on anti-species-ism may well be appropriate as a course offering in sociology or bioethics, but this focus is not at all appropriate as a class in research methodology in the arts. If a student in a painting class is given the task to write a paper about painting but then turns in a paper about photography, he or she is likely to receive a poor grade. Why then should a professor be allowed the “academic freedom” to veer far afield in his or her instruction?
Academic freedom is a foreign concept in the halls of many high schools and elementary schools, where teachers are expected to follow the district’s approved curriculum and to meet educational performance standards on state testing. Please don’t get me wrong, here—I am by no means a fan of high-stakes testing or other components of the No Child Left Behind mandate, nor do I support the subsequent implementation of canned “teacher-proof” curriculum. However, numerous school districts have developed cohesive sets of Essential Outcomes that provide teachers with a unified conceptual framework for curriculum development. The same is not true in colleges and universities, where students run a very real risk of paying thousands of dollars for a course that is not at all what it seems to be in the course catalog. Accreditation standards should drive curriculum development and university instructors should be held accountable for adhering to the published descriptions of the courses they teach. Educational bait-and-switch is a poor practice at best and this policy needs some serious attention, in my opinion.
A final word…
It is my firm belief that instructors and professors must thoughtfully construct their courses in order to create balanced educational experiences for their students focused on meaningful, relevant content, teaching according to the principles of fairness and accountability. Outcomes and objectives designed in accordance with accreditation standards provide a conceptual framework within which students receive a high-quality education, and those who have the good fortune to teach within higher educational settings must not abuse the privilege of academic freedom or disregard sound instructional practice either to promote a personal agenda or simply failing to meet the reasonable educational expectations of their students. Many college and university departments put up a good front when the accreditation committees come around for their periodic reviews; many professors perform well under scrutiny from tenure-granting committees; but, I believe the impetus for providing excellent education should be internally driven rather than externally mandated. Even if no one but the students is watching or listening, shouldn’t instruction be consistently fair, on-point, meaningful, and relevant? This is not an unreasonable expectation, nor is it revolutionary thinking on my part. The reality of the situation in many colleges and universities, though, would seem to indicate otherwise. I don’t think that my own experiences run that far from the norm, but it simply isn’t often discussed publically. Universities, at their core, hold a mission for research, service, and teaching, and the standards for good teaching should be no different for a professor in a graduate school classroom than they are in an elementary school. At least, that’s my opinion.