In 1983, Howard Gardner, a professor of cognition and education
at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, wrote a book that
changed the way people think about human intelligence. And while
Gardner’s book “Frames of Mind” and the theory of
multiple intelligences it outlines are now more than two decades
old, their effects are still being felt.
The book argues that instead of considering intelligence as a
single trait (someone is either intelligent, not intelligent or
somewhere in between), a person has seven intelligences, the
combination of which forms the complete person. It may seem an
unimportant distinction, but when high schools focus primarily on
only a few of Gardner’s intelligences, it’s a
distinction worth considering once students leave high school and
enter college.
“We do not address the full intelligences of the human
being,” said theater professor Michael Hackett. “The
SAT route that most of us have to go through now narrows the use of
the brain. Math ability and linguistic ability are only two (of the
seven intelligences).”
The other five of Gardner’s intelligences are spatial,
musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal and intrapersonal, and
according to Hackett, many of them can be developed through
studying the very subject students in The College may be reluctant
to embrace as an academic discipline: the arts.
But they don’t have a choice. The College’s General
Education requirements include a category titled “Visual and
Performance Arts Analysis and Practice,” from which all
incoming students must take one class before they graduate.
“That’s a decision that was made by the general
campus,” said Roslyn Haley, an undergraduate counselor in the
School of Theater, Film and Television. “They realized the
importance that the arts play in our society as a whole. To exclude
the arts would place students at an unfair disadvantage.”
And while many of the classes that fulfill the requirement come
from subject areas students may have encountered in high school
(art history, classics), others, such as film Professor Jonathan
Kuntz’s class on the history of the American motion picture
(Film and Television 106A), may seem foreign at first. But of the
190 students enrolled in the class when it was offered spring
quarter last year, only 13 of them were enrolled in the School of
Theater, Film and Television, the college under which the class is
offered. Of the other 177, a few were from the School of Arts and
Architecture, but over 170 were from The College.
“I’m aware of the fact that the class services the
general UCLA community,” Kuntz said. “I always tell my
(teaching associates) that 95% of the people in the class will be
taking this as their first film class and their only film
class.”
The appeal of Kuntz’s class (It’s consistently one
of the most difficult to get into at the university.) shows that
students in The College are interested in taking arts classes they
haven’t taken in high school, at least to fill their GE
requirement.
“The whole point of college is to learn a whole bunch of
random stuff and then major in what you like the most,” said
Katie Boyden, a second-year undeclared student who took
Kuntz’s class last spring. While she’s thinking about
studying psychobiology, she still values greatly what she learned
in the class.
Still, many of the classes that fulfill the GE requirement whose
subjects aren’t offered in most high schools study the arts
from a perspective with which most students should already be
familiar. Kuntz’s class places as much, if not more, emphasis
on the history of American moviemaking as it does on critical
analysis of the films themselves, as do many of the music and music
history courses offered.
“If you’re trying to remember names and titles and
dates, it’s like any other history course,” said Al
Bradley, the undergraduate student adviser for both the music and
ethnomusicology departments.
But is the best way to study the arts simply to study the
history of an art form? Not according to Gardner’s multiple
intelligences theory or to Hackett, who coordinated a year-long GE
Cluster series on performing arts that includes performance itself
as part of its curriculum. The series, titled “Inside the
Performing Arts: Interdisciplinary Explorations of Performance in
Society and Culture” (GE Cluster 23A-CW), requires students
to perform as well as analyze professional performances.
“There was no real model for performance being included as
a possibility for a GE for a college student,” Hackett said
of UCLA before his cluster series. “An econ student could
take acting, but it wouldn’t count for GE.”
In last year’s class, students took dance workshops at the
Getty museum as an assignment to help understand how dance was used
as a cultural expression of power in the French court of Louis XIV.
While students weren’t graded on the quality of their
performances, they were expected to apply what they had studied in
class to the physical workshop, and vice versa. To Hackett and the
course’s teaching team, it was a method that greatly
increased the students’ knowledge of the arts as a cultural
tool, as well as one for entertainment.
“(The teaching team) found that the students learned by
doing, not just by sitting in lines and rows and hearing us
talk,” Hackett said. “Some of the happiest class days
were when students got up and danced.”
Additionally, one of the series’ spring seminars, titled
“Shadow Theater” and taught by theater Professor
Patricia Harter, revolved around a culminating performance at the
end of the quarter in the Northwest Campus Auditorium. The students
spent the quarter learning about the Southeast Asian performance
art of shadow theater, in which performers use puppets to project
the action of the piece, culminating eventually in a production in
June.
According to Hackett, the 110 students in the cluster series
attended the performance, along with about 30 others who simply
wanted to see the show. Harter believes the seminar helped students
better understand the complexities of serious performance art.
“We’re all consumers of art in one way or
another,” she said. “You need to understand the process
of making decisions about art. The whole process of learning to
work in a community where artistic decisions are made is much more
difficult than making a decision on your own. It takes a great deal
of effort.”
That effort can come as a surprise to some who look at their
arts requirement, think back to high school arts classes, and
expect an easy “˜A’ with no real work required.
“The difference between high school and college in and of
itself implies that there’s going to be an advanced level for
study and there will be greater expectations for study,”
Haley said of the film and theater classes offered for GE credit in
The College. “In the arts you won’t find any AP
placement at all.”
Studying the arts, then, does not merely give students a break
from their more strenuous coursework. Instead, it tends to take
what students already know about the arts and force them to not
only expand that knowledge, but also apply it to a larger study of
the artists’ cultures. Like any other academic discipline, it
uses the specific to infer the general, and the more complex the
relationship, the better.
In Hackett’s cluster series, students were required to
attend various performing arts events and write about the artists
involved. But students didn’t write reviews. In fact,
according to Hackett, their opinions were relatively unimportant.
The best papers analyzed the performances, relating not how good or
bad it was, but how the artists’ methods related to their
messages. It’s a much more difficult task, but it solidifies
the notion that the arts are not a subject to be taken lightly,
especially in college.
“Performance has been used by culture as the highest
expression of philosophic, political or social ideas, so at a great
university, we need to discuss that,” Hackett said.
“Wouldn’t you be disappointed if you came to UCLA and
it wasn’t taxing or it didn’t require time?”