KY:Now that's just a wonderful question. The space came about, in brief, because there was a new dean who arrived about the same time that Time magazine gave Clemson the Time award [honoring the public college of the year], largely for its communication across the curriculum program. Carl Lovett, who had been director of the Pearce Center since its inception had left to take a job as a dean up in Pennsylvania. I had just started as the new director, and the dean asked “What are you going to do next?” [Laughs] This is not necessarily the way one wants to begin one's administrative tenure!
I wrote a concept paper in which I made the observation that students were being asked in classes across the campus to engage in assignments that asked them to talk to people, to create posters, and to write papers that accompanied the posters. Moreover, writing these days, generally speaking, and certainly on the Clemson campus, was digitized; however, when you looked at the curriculum that helped students do this, it was actually pretty balkanized. Students who wanted help in speaking went to Communication Studies, people who wanted help in writing came to English, and students who wanted help in creating a poster had no place to go. If you really took communication across the curriculum pretty seriously, in addition to having a faculty development effort, which is basically what we had, you should have a student piece as well.
|
I knew enough about a studio to make me dangerous (and not, frankly, much more). I said that a studio model would be a good way to deliver that kind of curriculum, and that it really, was a kind of “extra” curriculum in that it wasn't located in a single class. |
I did create a class whose function was to prepare students to be peer tutors, what we called Studio Associates. One of the basic texts in the class, for instance, was Bolter and Grusin's Remediation. Another text was Berger's Another Way of Telling, which is really about photography rather than art, a parallel text in some ways to Ways of Seeing. Students just loved it, and the sophomores who took that class are now getting ready to graduate this year. What that means is not only did they take that class, but they chose to stay with the Studio. There was no turnover. And these are students from across the disciplines. In fact, I'm writing letters right now for someone who wants to go to graduate school in Marketing, someone else in Health Studies. It's just a wonderful, wonderful group of folks.
We had designed that space as multipurpose, and there's a thing in architecture called “hoteling,” which is basically creating a space where no single person owns the space. You might have a cubbyhole where you can keep some of your stuff, but it allows enormous “circulation.” To accomplish this effect, we designed basically three spaces. One is a conference area that can seat up to 40, and the tables are all movable. It’s got tack boards in there, it's got a screen, it's got a DVD player, it's wireless, it's the whole shebang. Then there is a larger area that we refer to as “Studio A” and “Studio B” that has two carrels. You could have one-on-one tutoring in those carrels, but otherwise it is wide open and really designed for collaborative work. There are two smart boards in there, and, again, a lot of tack boards, some cabinets, video editing equipment, a scanner, a bunch of computers, and two printers (a color printer and a black-and-white). It's the only color printer the students can access on campus (they have to bring their own paper; that was the deal we set up with that).
A third area is basically a small lobby and a little sunroom that is a display area. The lobby has a big whiteboard in it, and we've been using that as well for tutoring spaces. There's one-on-one tutoring going on; there's a lot of collaborative work and teamwork going on. Sometimes students are asked to come work in that space, and sometimes they simply choose to come work in that space.
Two other activities that have gone on in the space include poetry jams—that was the students' idea. The students, other than providing the $50 for the pizza, do everything. They arrange the sort of “table of contents” for the night; they announce it all over campus. And it's always a wonderful event, and we pack in as many students as is humanly possible. It's just absolutely amazing. Then we had some colleagues in English who wanted to teach in the space, so right from the beginning we had a couple of classes there. We had a “Eureka!” moment where we thought, “Why don't we invite faculty to apply to teach in the space?” In Studio A and Studio B together, you could host a class of up to about 40 students. It would not feel very “class-like,” I tell you, but that actually is good news.
We invited faculty to apply, and we had more applicants than we actually had opportunity. For two terms now, we've had faculty from Economics, from Biochemistry, and from Biology teaching in the studio. We also wanted to know why faculty wanted to teach in the studio. What did they want to learn? We began to develop a repertoire here in terms of what draws a teacher to this kind of space and what they get out of it. If you look at the repertoire of activities in the Studio, it's like a portrait: You begin to get a picture of what this kind of space offers.
Our hope was that people would find ways to “bootleg” back into a more conventional teaching space some of what they had learned about working in a studio space. That's a very wonderful way of really helping teaching become much more about learning. You're really making the change through the back door, and faculty chose to do this. The fact that people actually wanted to do this was just really wonderful.
I'll give you one more purpose for the Studio. It opened in January 2004, so I was there for about 18 months before I left. We were using it as a site to host other kinds of events that would link Clemson to other projects. One example was developing a relationship with the Greenville Advertising Club. Eleven advertising professionals came for an evening event, and students applied to come to this particular night (it was a long night —three hours worth of a night), and we had spots for 10 students from Marketing, 10 students from Communication Studies, 10 students from Graphic Communication, and 10 students from English. Students brought their portfolios with them, and first heard the presentation from the Greenville Advertising Club, whose members have done lots of different things.
It was really interesting to hear them talk about how their careers had changed and what motivated those changes. Sometimes the changes were intentional and sometimes, honestly, they were just serendipitous. Then they met with the students afterwards: We arranged for each student to talk with at least two members of the Greenville Advertising Club. It was amazing and just wonderful.
A second exchange was using the Studio as a site for the Clemson Digital Portfolio Institutes where people came in from around the country. The last summer we ran three institutes. There was one that was an introduction, there was one that was on assessment and design, and there was one that was on research.
There's a theory in architecture about buildings teaching you about how they want to be used. I think that it's a little more reciprocal than that, but I think there's definitely an element of that here. It has absolutely changed my teaching. And even thinking about how we would create a studio changed my teaching. I'll tell you about one very specific way: One of my current “hobby horses” is an interest in writing as a material practice, and I'm quite persuaded that it came out of working in a studio environment.
