Skills

WORK IN PROGRES

Essential Skills for Artists

This list emerged from conversations with instructors about what skills they felt their students needed to learn:

• compassionate rigor

• collaborative spirit

• sustainable practice

• empathic imagination

• humble flexibility

• adaptive patience

• creative perseverance

• hopeful resilience

Managing expectations for students (and yourself)

• This class will be different. Tell your students that. Tell yourself that. Repeat.

• A lot of this will depend on if you’re working with technical, conceptual, research, or professional skills, as well as their progression in the program.

• My intuition is that a combination of small weekly assignments (as a check-in) with 2-3 larger projects (that they’ve had input in designing) will work well.

• Post the schedule for the weekly assignments as soon as possible so students can work ahead (or catch up) as they need to.

• Be flexible with projects—it might need to change as the situation changes.

• You could also choose to create a menu of options, where students have a variety of choices for different projects that might be possible in their homes but will still connect to the conceptual ideas of the project.

• This class will be something different, and let students know you’ll figure out what those differences are together.