Freshman Seminars Highlight Art-Making Opportunities

Instead of reading a book about the history of the American quilt, some freshmen stitched their own last fall. And instead of listening to a lecture about the cultural significance of composer Leonard Bernstein, another group of freshmen danced to excerpts from his masterpiece “West Side Story.”

These are just two examples of the twelve freshman seminars available this academic year that include an art-making component.

Using extra funding provided by University President Drew G. Faust last year, the Freshman Seminar Program created a new set of seminars that combine traditional academic learning with a more artistic, hands-on approach.

Roughly ten percent of students currently enrolled in the Freshman Seminar Program have opted for seminars that include some form of art-making, according to program director Sandra F. Naddaff ’75.

The excitement surrounding the new course offerings has not been limited only to students, but has extended to faculty as well, according to Naddaff.

“It was very exciting to see the creativity with which the faculty responded to this opportunity,” she said.

This year, for example, History Professor Laurel Ulrich—renowned for coining the phrase “Well-behaved women seldom make history”—inserted a quilt-making unit into her material history seminar on the significance of the American quilt.

“One of the ways to understand an artifact is to try to understand how it was made, and one of the ways to understand how it was made is to try some of the steps,” Ulrich said. “I was surprised how much people learned by trying to do it.”

BEYOND ACADEMIA

From the perspective of Expository Writing Preceptor Zachary C. Sifuentes ’97-’99, the freshman seminars that include an art-making component encourage students to look beyond traditional methods of learning and to directly interact with the art itself.

“Around here, I’ve seen that we often try to solve problems just with our heads and not our hands,” Sifuentes said. “Doing and reflecting and re-doing makes it happen a lot faster.”

By offering students the opportunity to play with letter types on the page, Sifuentes’ seminar—“Pressing the Page: Making Art with Letters, Paper, and Ink”—allows freshmen to consider language as a physical process and artform.

Sifuentes added that the manual creation of prints has a mystical quality, particularly in an era of computer printers. The print-making process “physically” inserts the creator and generates “much more immediate interaction,” he said.

“What we’re doing is...physically manifesting the process that a lot of scholarship engages in, the thinking on paper,” Sifuentes said.

The hands-on approach of seminars like Sifuentes’ offers a unique experience for freshmen, who may later grow jaded by the standard classroom methodologies at Harvard, he said.

“Lots of people forget that learning was fun for them,” Sifuentes added.

LEARNING THROUGH DOING

While Sifuentes’s seminar is almost exclusively activity-based learning, most of the art-making freshman seminars balance this component with comprehensive grounding in academic and theoretical learning.

Though Dramatic Arts Lecturer Remo F. Airaldi assigns readings to his students in “The Art and Craft of Acting,” he also asks them to keep a journal about their daily musings on performance art. Students are further required to attend showings at the American Repertory Theater.

In “Movement and Meaning: Dance Culture, and Identity in the 20th Century”—which also seeks to balance academic and creative approaches toward a given artform—students spent the first half of every seminar practicing movement exercises.

“When it comes to kinesthetic activity, you can only say so much in writing as opposed to experiencing it with your body.” said Shayna R.M. Skal ’13, who took the course last fall.

For her final project, Skal not only used theoretical readings from the course, but choreographed and performed a dance by using chance procedure, a method of choreography introduced in class.

Chance procedure involves developing short movement phrases in varying length and size and then performing them in random order—a strategy quite different from the strict choreography of ballet that Skal had trained in before coming to college.

“I was so used to classical ballet—you follow the beat, you have your accent on that counter note,” said Skal, who added that she had been apprehensive about performing a piece using such an unfamiliar method.

NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY

Even for someone like Skal, who had danced ballet before college, the Freshmen Seminar Program allows students of varying experiences to expand their horizons in the arts.

“The idea of a freshman seminar is that you can try something totally out of your comfort zone, something that you are not sure you are going to excel at whatsoever,” said Miriam E. Psychas ’13, who took the “Movement and Meaning” seminar.

Psychas, who likes to “dance for fun” but never studied the art in an academic setting, said she thought the seminar would be an “interesting way to look at something that I do so often in a totally different perspective.”

The seminars expose students to a wide range of traditions in the arts—and even the more experienced of the group said they benefit from the diversity.

Skal, who has trained in ballet since the age of four, said that the less-experienced students’ input during a class discussion of the ballet classic “The Rite of Spring” allowed her to view the subject with fresh perspective.

Skal said that she had been “so busy with the technical side” of the performance, that she had not noticed the more abstract interpretations of the dance and the authentic “religious, ritual feel” of the style cited by her classmates.

A LOW-STRESS ENVIRONMENT

Current freshman seminar students said that individuals who lack experience in the arts feel comfortable enrolling in these art-making courses because they are taken pass-fail.

Even experienced students said that they found themselves exploring topics and areas that they may not have entertained had the course been graded traditionally.

Had Skal’s final project been subject to “more of a stringent grade,” she said she probably would not have chosen to explore such an unfamiliar dance method.

Psychas said that she had a similar experience while writing papers for the “Movement” course.

“It was cool in that you felt like you could take a risk,” said Psychas, adding that she chose topics she was interested in, despite the uncertainty that she would be able to develop a strong argument in an unfamiliar terrain.

At one point, Psychas said she chose to write a paper that compared originals and remakes of musicals involving dance, such as “Hairspray” and “Dirty Dancing.”

“It was a really awesome opportunity to watch all these musicals that I had really wanted to watch and then analyze them and write about them,” Psychas said. “But had it been a graded class, I wouldn’t have risked choosing a topic that was kind of out there.”

—Elyssa A.L. Spitzer contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer James K. McAuley can be reached at mcauley@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Julia L. Ryan can be reached at jryan@college.harvard.edu.