News broke last week about two new additions to the Landmarks collection. Marc Quinn’s Spiral of the Galaxy will anchor the gateway to the Dell Medical School in September and Ann Hamilton’s O N E E V E R Y O N E will be installed in multiple buildings at the Dell Medical School in January. The projects will have scholarly essays written by UT doctoral candidate Robin Williams (Quinn) and art historian and critic Nancy Princenthal (Hamilton).
Learning with Landmarks
Learning with Landmarks is a dedicated blog series highlighting the unique and innovative ways that students and other scholars use the collection. Landmarks’ blog, Latest, features timely updates on new installations, public programs, event announcements, volunteer and internship opportunities, and a range of other initiatives. To view the entire series, click the button below.
Professor Min Liu and her Digital Media Tech and Learning class in the School of Undergraducate Studies visited Landmarks again this semester. After a tour of the collection, students broke into groups and chose one of the works to highlight in a video. The assignment taught students to use video editing tools and to think about effective ways to communicate with digital media.
Last week, Landmarks took center stage in a lesson on educational theatre in Dr. Pauline Strong’s Intro to Museum Studies course. Teaching assistant Sam Provenzano, a graduate student in the Department of Theatre and Dance, wrote the assignment to teach how “theatrical performances in museums [help] create new access points for patrons experiencing art, history, science, etc.”
A healthy development at universities across the country is the implementation of an interdisciplinary curriculum. When mathematics and the sciences are taught with the aid of the humanities, learning becomes more experiential and memorable.
During the day when the light sequence in the James Turrell Skyspace The Color Inside is not running, the space is used by students on campus as a quiet retreat. They are found relaxing, studying, napping, and even knitting between classes. Recently, an upper-level poetry course taught by Laurie Saurborn, Director of Undergraduate Creative Writing in the Department of English, visited the Skyspace for an automatic writing exercise. The simplistic environment allowed students to record a stream of consciousness without distractions.
The School of Undergraduate Studies at UT is where students go to get their collegiate feet wet. They take core classes while they learn about academic programs across campus and decide where to transfer and declare a major.
Signature Courses is one avenue students can take to explore their varied interests. These are small classes of no more than 18 students; they are multidisciplinary and, more often than not, taught by tenured or tenure-track professors who propose the courses. Courses this semester range from Hidden Treasures of Plants: Fuel, Food, Meds, and Money; Road Movies, Quixotic Journeys; and Middle East Today.