art/vision/voice - Maryland Institute College of Art

above, merging into you performance
culminating from exercises like those
at left, for the teaching practicum class,
association house of chicago, 2003.
case study: columbia college chicago 43
differently. But some of the Association House kids, although they
totally respected Ron, they didn’t want to cross his path in the
wrong way.
ron I take the teaching as passionately as the art, because I don’t see
a difference. So yeah, I get emotional when I’m teaching, too. It’s an
emotional art! So what amazes me is that people get upset when a
teacher gets emotional. It’s supposed to be an emotional art. If your
teacher is not living the process they’re teaching, then I don’t really
think they are doing it. But I don’t find that moment of conflict, the
emotional moment, to be the real moment of learning. The turning
point [is] when everything is calm again and we examine the emotional
moment, and then we deconstruct it. That’s the important part
of the process.
luis I’ve been teaching my kids not to let other people’s opinions bring
them down, so I just took the same approach. . . . I’m not going to
let a scolding bring me down, so to speak; I’m going to use it as a
learning place. It solidified my own teaching style. The exercise I
was doing is essentially the same as what Free Street does, I just
presented it in a different way. I have confidence in the approach
that I’m taking, and I’m going to continue to do that.
With the semester more than half over, the process was working well,
especially in terms of creating a curriculum, establishing a strong, safe
creative environment, and resolving conflict. However, the group was
behind schedule in the process of creating a functional script and coming
up with a staged performance. The instructors realized that the performance
of a final, completed piece was important to the students as a tangible
representation of their work, so the focus shifted.
kym I did, honestly, get a little nervous. “Are we ever going to get to an
end piece? Is there going to be an end piece?” There was a point
when the students from the class were like, “What’s going on? Is
there a script? Has it been written? Is there going to be a play?” At
the beginning, Ron and Brian were like, “We’re working toward it,
we’re working toward it.” Then it was like, “Yeah, you know what?
There needs to be an end product and we’re going to get it done,
and that’s going to be that.” It wasn’t that it was really tense, but we
did feel a change in how things were then conducted whenever
we were at Association House.
Before, we would come together and try all these different
things, and we were each getting our turn to teach. And then things