In the last weeks I let my opinions about the multiple choice question and the short answer essay fly wildly. If you haven’t read those you might be interested to check them out. I issued my preferred type of question (short answer) to my students in a test and was recently able to read their responses. I was astounded.
I’ve written about the course I’m teaching before but a brief recap is in order. It is a strange (but very valuable) course as it is taught by three different instructors from three different areas. Visual Art, Music and Theatre are all represented under one roof for one dedicated purpose: to reveal the importance of the arts to contemporary culture for our students.
There are a wide variety of ways those goals can be met. This semester the approach taken was less concretely unified between the areas. One of the things that the students of our current culture has demonstrated is an ability to make connections between seemingly divided things themselves. Whether this is due to the internet or computers or the ease of multitasking our students are more able than ever to find connections for themselves.
To that end our structure for the course kept the individual artistic areas separate to explore and present the issues most relevant in those individual fields to the students without providing the connections. What I found in the short answer essays that I graded for this past test was the students making those connections between mediums. While I only asked them about theatre (or in one instance film) they took that question and independant of what I asked blended in what they’ve learned about Visual Art and Music throughout the semester into their response. The arts, then, had become relevant to them (and connected) without a dedicated (and structured) attempt to teach those connections to the students throughout the course by the instructors. I’d call that a success.