Project Summary

I am studying how students learn in an interdisciplinary first year semester freshman Honors seminar. Before students attend a variety of exhibits and performances in New York City, they read context setting materials and grapple with leading questions that I post on our electronic discussion board and then build on in the classroom. After the site visit, students write and then extensively revise papers about the experience. In individual conferences with the students, I review their initial responses on the discussion board and try to guide them to see how the performance or exhibit adds complexity to the materials they are investigating. Through this process, they learn the difference between a superficial review and a critical essay and gain some grounding in the different art forms and the interrelationships of their aesthetic principles.

Empowering Students By Letting Them Create Criteria For Writing and Revising

Teaching students how to revise increasingly seems to me a crucial component of our work. Having relied throughout my teaching career on individual student conferences to review graded papers, in fall 2003 I used the electronic discussion board to help students begin revising before papers are submitted. They re-read a series of articles about the recent Broadway production of "Long Day's Journey Into Night," which the students saw during their late summer orientation to the CUNY Honors program. Having previously discussed the content and approach of these varied pieces (from daily newspaper review to academic critique), before assigning the paper on Mozart's "Marriage of Figaro"(this year's opera), I asked students to use these examples in a discussion forum that got them to articulate for themselves the instructions for writing the paper, rather than handing them an assignment like those to be found elsewhere on this poster for the papers on "The Magic Flute" and "Madama Butterfly. more...

Links

An early version of a student paper
This student showed real imagination in improving a paper after a conference. Unfortunately for my researchable question, his personal intelligence is the real factor at work here. He fell asleep during the performance he described, so the visceral impact of his theatre experience can't have been the spur to his ability to refine ideas.

Final, improved version
This revision shows creativity and an ability to grasp the significance of a comment about the inert quality of the introductory paragraph in the first version above.

Lincoln Center at Night

The glamor of the Metropolitan Opera House fascinates the students in the CUNY Honors College.

Course Context

"The Arts in New York City" introduces first-semester freshmen to the CUNY Honors College. On each campus, individual sections of 20 students study theater, opera, dance, and the visual arts by attending an example of each form in NYC. The work of the course is to prepare them for the richest possible understanding of the work in situ. more...

Links

studentsyllabushonfall01.doc
This is the course syllabus for fall 2001.

syllabusfall02.doc
This is the syllabus for fall 2002.

syllabusfall2003.doc

Key Learning Activities

Students learn to connect what they understand about the materials studied in a formal academic context--reading a script or a libretto, perhaps watching scenes on a videotape, and discussing their significance--to the realization of these materials in a live encounter with the object or art form. This process culminates in their writing and revising an essay that attempts a mature critique of the work encountered. In addition to handing out an assignment sheet explaining how the students were to write their major critical essays about the experience of attending a performance of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro at the Metropolitan Opera, I posted a series of questions asking them to describe the writing strategies of two different critics whose essays about the performance of Long Day's Journey Into Night we had read early in the semester. At the end of the semester, I asked the students whether they thought this exercise had helped them formulate the thesis and structure the evidence of their own essays. Their responses indicated that they felt they had been influenced by that discussion. The essays that they submitted after this exercise was undertaken were more successful as first drafts than most of the essays I had received from students in earlier years. more...

Links

The Magic Flute
This is the complicated multi-part assignment sheet that the students had to plow through in preparing to see "The Magic Flute."

ACF3E38.doc
Madama Butterfly

Prompts for writing a critique
These study questions helped students think about the essay they were to write in a self-analytical way.

How Students View Their Own Incremental Learning

To make student progress more transparent, to them and to me, I have begun to ask for self-reflection at the semester's end. Students were asked to respond to two questions asking them to review their contributions to the electronic discussion board to see whether they had changed their mind about any of their original answers and then to characterize the questions they had chosen to answer to see what their choices revealed about the way their minds work. Most of them expressed satisfaction with their original answers, but said that they would have been able to expand their early responses because of what they had learned in the course of the semester. The latter belief is encouraging; the former attitude impedes the work of real revision, and therefore, I designed a new assignment described to the right of this section under the rubric "More Evidence of Student Learning: Self-Reflection and Revision." 

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Fall 2002 Students
These responses were prepared for the final class evaluations and show a general sense of new understanding but a certain complacency about first impressions.