Fall 2022 issue

» Robert Danisch, Professor, Director of Arts First 

Arts First turned five years old this academic year. That means we’ve had over six thousand undergraduates take our seminars, and we’ve taught over five hundred sections of courses. We’ve breathed new life into the core requirements for all students in our faculty and re-imagined what their first-year experience can feel like in the classroom.

As a part of this program, I have learned a lot over these last five years, particularly about good teaching and how talented our students are. Whenever I talk about this program, I remind people that we intentionally background the discipline-specific knowledge that we teach in our home departments so that we can foreground the processes of inquiry, communication, and analysis that are at the core of all forms of intellectual work. We do this to help students build their abilities to think deeply and critically, to speak and write effectively and eloquently, and to make evaluations and judgments about the evidence and arguments they encounter in the world. Now, more than ever, such skills can make a difference, both for our students and for the world they encounter when they graduate.

In Arts First, we practice slow teaching. We don’t rush to cover some body of knowledge; we create spaces for students to actively engage in critical intellectual work and guide them to reflect on how they might become better writers, readers, thinkers, and inquirers. This kind of slow teaching demystifies the tacit assumptions about the know-how of university work. Our classrooms become inclusive spaces because of this focus on making explicit what might otherwise be implicit in how we make and communicate knowledge. We design engaging classroom activities that put the students in the driver’s seat of their education, and we use scaffolded assignments that help students improve each step of the way. Those slow moments in the classroom, where students and teachers are actively working together, wrestling with a difficult question or problem, can be transformative and can feel meaningfully different.

This program is a shining example of what interdisciplinary teaching can be. Interdisciplinarity need not be just the combination of methods or knowledge from two different disciplines. It’s naming and exploring the intellectual spaces between disciplines, and it’s thinking about, and thinking through, the kinds of practical know-how that every discipline uses and that is integral to the future success of our students. We can use Arts First to build a broader, bolder sense of interdisciplinarity in Arts if we continue the conversation about what kind of core student capacities we want to teach and build, and what kind of critical intellectual questions we ought to investigate across our different disciplinary areas of expertise.

I hope that the next five years of this program brings more faculty into the fold, more new ideas for seminars, more excellent student work, and more of the sense of community that all of our students crave. I also hope the next five years extends the conversation about what questions or capacities lie at the core of all that we do across Arts. What do faculty and students from Psychology share with those in History? What connects work in Sociology or Economics with the creative pursuits in Fine Arts or Theatre and Performance? How can we ask questions and do work in those spaces between our disciplines and how might such an endeavor transform our own teaching and research? Those are the questions I’ll be thinking about going forward. I hope there are others reading this that will join me.

In the meantime, I want to express my deepest gratitude to all of the hardworking teachers that have made this program a success during the last five years – thank you.

He's back and ready for nose rubs! As you may remember from our last issue, Porcellino went on a surprise visit to a certain faculty-that-shall-not-be-named. After some much-needed recovery time, our beloved boar returned to his home outside Modern Languages this fall.  

A big thank you to our colleagues in Plant Operations for rescuing Porcellino and making sure he got back to his home in one piece again.