art/vision/voice - Maryland Institute College of Art

william stretching his face.
case study: columbia college chicago 41
exercises along with them too, because I wanted to experience
them, to see if I understood the instructions and, you know, be
“down in the pit,” as it were. I think trust was built pretty quickly
that way—we were all in this together.
luis The first day we all worked together, the two student teachers had
to have a lot of nerve and energy to be the first ones to get up and
work with the kids. When the Columbia College group first came in,
it was pretty hectic. It can get chaotic when you have ten high-school
students, three lead teachers, and then you have ten extra college
students. It becomes a room of twenty five people with very different
approaches and directorial visioning. We have so many people
together, it could be potentially disastrous.
ron Almost every time for the first seven or eight weeks, I couldn’t tell
what the Columbia students’ warm-ups were for. I mean, maybe
to get them warm, but obviously a warm-up is more than that. They
have a real purpose. We’d meet back at Columbia College on Fridays
and I would say, “Okay, that exercise you did, what was it for?”
And they would look at me and they wouldn’t have a reason for it.
So I’d go, “How do you want your students to be at the end of
your warm-up?” And then we would develop an idea for an exercise
that would get the students to that place. And then they would
take the exercises they know and match them up with what we
were trying to do.
Beginning teachers sometimes forget all these little steps they
took to understanding, so they leap ahead two or three steps in an
exercise. They try to get to the end without going through the
process. As young teachers, when they get nervous they get tunnel
vision, and instead of looking at the situation and reacting to it,
they just plow through whatever they’re doing, whether it’s working
or not, trying to get to the end. But the end result flows from the
process—you can’t take those steps away and still have it work.
brian There was a moment about halfway through the course when we
put Luis in a difficult position and then made his position even
more difficult. On this particular day, one student teacher was
supposed to lead the high school students through a thirty-minute
warm-up and another would do a thirty-minute bridge activity, and
then they’d hand it over to Luis, but what they were doing didn’t
work. They were teaching an improvisation, and they skipped about
five steps. You can’t do that and have it work, so people were
pretending to be doing what was being asked of them, but they
weren’t understanding it, and it was pretty painful to watch.