First Year Advisor Evaluations

M502 - Studio Project assessment – Laura Gonzales

Given its pedagogical and experiential nature, Claire found the documentation of her project challenging last semester. For this semester, she has concentrated on developing a workshop on performance anxiety as a method. She decided to disseminate the project as a website. I think that this was a very smart decision and Claire has addressed the issues both of pedagogy (if this is a method, how is it passed on) and documentation (how is it accessed) remarkably well. The final work gives a good platform and framework from which to study her work and take it further. It is rich in text and records of the delivery, and the videos provide a good starting point to teach performance. What Claire has achieved is very good.

There are still some issues in the project, as I think. It is very text heavy (this may cause problems around accessibility) and perhaps the design, participation and feedback could also be honed and expanded. But the method is there, and it has been tested and put out in the world. It is a great gift! Claire has been thorough, engaged, concerned in her work and very generous. Her final workshop website is proof of this.

As well as issues of content, curriculum design and feedback, and the journey of the participant, Claire and I discussed what teaching is as opposed to facilitation or other forms of engagement. We also discussed documentation and whether it should be private or public given the nature of her group. We explored who the viewer or user might be and the role of the self in her work (and her needs too). We looked at educational contexts, such as MIT, Yale, Harvard, Transart and some MOOCS, as well as pedagogical body practitioners such as Nancy Stark-Smith, Guillermo Gomez-Peña and the Suzuki method.

Her final workshop structure is playful and interdisciplinary, interesting and experimental as well as critical, as demonstrated by the section on PODS. Of course, her work is complex to access online: it is essentially experiential (as learning and performance are). I think the learning objectives and goals Claire has set for herself could be tested longer term. Any kind of project like the one she has attempted to undertake takes far more than what the framework of an MFA offers in terms of time. This year, however, and specially this semester, Claire has focused, clarified, finished, examined, critiqued and documented a well articulated hypothesis and, judging by the documentation, this has been extremely successful for for her as an educator, and for her participants as well.

MCP503 – Research paper assessment – Laura Bissell

Overall this is a good piece of writing that draws comparisons and connections between your own work and other practitioners working within the field of performance art. I don’t think this is a fully developed pedagogical approach and I think there is more research that could be done in this area to develop these ideas so I would encourage you to continue with this enquiry throughout the Transart process. This submission opens with a statement of the enquiry undertaken and this clearly sets up the line of argument that will be explicated. In a researched paper it is not acceptable to cite Wikipedia, even if you justify why you are doing it! Citing sources such as this (even playfully) undermines the integrity of your research and should be avoided at all costs. Published or peer-reviewed sources are a much more appropriate and this citation is also overly long. It is commendable that you integrate citations to evidence what you say but you should take a look at the options available for referencing – what you use in this submission is not far away from the Harvard system so this is probably the best one to apply in future work.

The section where you write about the self feels clear and confident and you relate the concepts you are working with to your practice well. When you move on to discuss pedagogy it is important that you include full references for the citations you use and I think these ideas around pedagogy could be interrogated much more thoroughly. Your two key texts here are good but you need to demonstrate more fully how your own processes of experimentation relate to these practices and how your exercises can be made into a pedagogical approach rather than a series of tasks and exercises. You say you are going to “critically analyse your process” and I think that this could be pushed much further as you continue to develop these ideas. The participant comments at the end are useful but perhaps these could be integrated into your writing earlier on to give a sense of them evidencing your line of argument.