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(The Visual Arts Foundation Program at Watkins College of Art, Design &…
The Visual Arts Foundation Program at Watkins College of Art, Design & Film is
concentrated within the first year as an
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Learning Outcomes
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use form and content to make work that is informed by and communicates purposefully within social and cultural contexts as well as within the conventions of each discipline.
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Space
The faculty recognized that a Visual Arts Foundation QEP would be challenging in terms of facilities needs, as
there was consensus that each student should have dedicated space in which to work in a semester-long or year-long Visual Arts Foundation Program.
A Visual Arts Foundation Program with an interdisciplinary core to provide a vital
first-year initiation into each student’s chosen discipline, ensuring that each
student acquires the necessary language and experience to communicate and
collaborate with colleagues in each discipline at the college.
The faculty wanted the opportunity to bring the Visual Arts Foundation program into
better alignment with the studio-based curriculum referenced in the institutional mission statement and to give it a strong conceptual component to connect it firmly to the academic foundation also referenced in the mission statement. The faculty felt that for students to realize their creative potential in the current art world, they should have a shared foundation that enables fluid communication and collaboration across disciplines.
Most of the faculty wanted to see a Visual Arts Foundation Program that would bring together
students from all disciplines to learn collaboratively, but also recognized that there could be challenges to making such a program relevant and useful for all disciplines.
Several participants pointed out that a Visual Arts Foundation QEP would provide the opportunity
and challenge for all departments to review and revise their plans of study and for faculty-wide exploration of pedagogical philosophy and method.
the faculty wanted the visual arts foundation
program to be more relevant to each course of study and became increasingly interested in
reconfiguring the program to encompass the range of concepts and skills that students needed
for performance in all departments.
The Visual Arts Foundation Program strengthens the studio-based curriculum of the college,
and as the course descriptions for Visual Arts Foundation I (Appendix 3) and Visual Arts
Foundation II (Appendix 4) reveal, the program is learning-centered and does indeed engage
the mind, train the eye and cultivate talent and skill into an active realization of creative
potential. Including an emphasis on social and cultural context, communication and critique, it
works in synergy with the academic foundation that is also central to the institutional mission.
The Visual Arts Foundation Program will strengthen the student-learning environment of the
college by bringing together groups of students from different disciplines for sustained and
intense interaction and collaboration. This is valuable not only for building community,
increasing identification with the institution and improving retention, but ultimately of lasting
value for students who will graduate into an arts environment in which collaboration is
increasingly expected and only possible for artists who understand the vocabulary and materials
of disciplines in addition to their own.