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This forum is my invitation for you to share your thoughts, experiences and suggestions regarding the ASU Herberger College of The Arts and its evolving initiatives to ensure student success in light of contemporary challenges, develop innovative curriculum programs, and increase community embeddedness. Please use this space to exchange opinions, relate experiences and propose solutions. All visitors are encouraged to post entries or comment on the entries of others. The most recent posts appear on the front page.
Kwang-Wu Kim
Disclaimer: Messages posted on this site are those of the writers; they do not necessarily express the views of Arizona State University or the Herberger College of The Arts.
A Call to Action
April 11, 2008 by Kwang-Wu Kim
On March 18, 2008, I issued the first of a series of position papers on higher education and the arts. In A Call to Action, I outline the opportunities, challenges and imperatives facing the Herberger College as we commit to the mission of The New American University and determine how we will continue to deliver a rigorous, meaningful education in the arts to a broader range of students from diverse backgrounds. I believe that it is time to re-examine the college’s organizational and unit structure to analyze whether it optimally supports our educational, creative and research agendas. We must develop a long-term plan for growth which takes into consideration the increasing focus on the Tempe campus as the university’s research base.
In the face of this complicated array of priorities, the primary work at hand is the examination and redesign of our curricula. We must:
- Create a college-wide BA in the Arts, which allows students not prepared for or interested in existing specialized programs an opportunity to gain an arts-based liberal arts education.
- Create a curriculum for the study of digital culture, which incorporates emphases on new media development and on media arts defined as an extension of contemporary arts practice.
- Embed community engagement work in the curriculum for all students.
- Examine all existing requirements in light of the imperative to ensure student success.
- Create new hybrid/transdisciplinary programs and majors.
- Create a mechanism for students to propose and design their own majors.
- Grow programs that can transition students directly into successful careers such as teacher education, arts therapy and ensure students an optimal entry path to these programs.
- Add new professional master’s degree and certification programs, which can appeal to new student populations and serve as a significant new source of revenue to the college.
- Grow programs that have a distinctive focus on place.
- Grow programs that focus on the scholarship of the arts in community.
- Grow programs in which we can excel and that contribute to the differentiated excellence of the college.
- Expand our use of online course delivery and improve the nature of learning, which takes place through this technology.
- Build into our programs rich opportunities for our students to experience current practice.
I believe that the opportunity before us is enormous and that the invitation for us to determine our own future is real. In the face of our state’s current fiscal challenges, the time to act is now. Now is the moment to draw attention to our creativity and to the intrinsic value of the traditions on which we build and knowledge we embody. I call on the faculty of the Herberger College of The Arts to join me in this necessary, challenging and time-consuming work. Without your expertise, your creativity and your leadership, we will not succeed in advancing our college to its rightful stature within the New American University and in the world.
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Dean Kim:
I just filled out the survey, I want to emphasize that this curricula should focus on students working in groups, as a kind of arts-affinity group, to explore particular issues in art and culture, and foment interdisciplinary collaboration; the artist as problem solver, as explorer, as questioner.
I also feel strongly that we should emphasize real-time face-to-face interaction, not online coursework.
I look forward to being involved in the development of this degree, and hope that my new course, THE 494/URB 494/PAF 591 LIVING THE ARTS, DOWNTOWN ARTS SURVEY, which is to be offered in the Spring of ‘09, might fit well within its intentions.
Can this proposed program guide our students toward finding strategies for promoting the arts as a solver of problems as well as a generator of questions? How can artists be more fully engaged in taking their skills into practical, results-based uses and markets? It would be exciting to pair students from this general BA with students in the discipline specific BA programs, synergizing their perspectives.
For example, how could visual and performing arts students use their skills to build a market and consensus around sustainability concepts?
How might they create events, actions, images that make the public want to use the new light rail, consume less power, examine their place in the food chain, etc.?
I do NOT mean that we should insist that all artists and arts students justify their art through social action or engagement. My hope is that students (and faculty) can help our students extend their work beyond only one market and/or context.