A Corridor That Leads to New Kinds of Learning

Shendos for Quartet, Tom Baker (2004)

In my capacity as Resident Research Fellow at Cornish College of the Arts, I have been working with faculty across the visual and performing arts disciplines to develop a comprehensive offering of college electives. The new program called, The Creative Corridor, will address a range of transdisciplinary options, skill based learning and publicly engaged scholarship in the arts. 

The elective offerings are 3 credit classes aimed at the sophomore and junior level. The breadth of courses are designed to inspire students to connect concepts, theories, and methods to real-world practice, ignite collaborative opportunities inside and outside Cornish to produce relevant creative work. There are no prerequisites, so that students are encouraged to move beyond their own disciplinary boundaries and create lateral connections across the visual and performing arts disciplines. There are 6 learning themes:

The Creative Corridor holds expansion possibilities for our faculty and staff as well. The vision for the Cornish Arts Pedagogy Studio (CAPS) is to create a learning space, both physical and virtual, where members of our teaching and learning community can incubate new ideas, share best practices, co-create curriculum, research emerging critical and digital pedagogies and connect to a wide network of innovative practitioners and scholars in the visual and performing arts.

Our goals: To Inspire critical thinking and critical making – To evolve new approaches to teaching that amplify learning – To create new knowledge- sharing platforms for innovation – To ignite radically dynamic collaboration with stakeholders and produce publicly engaged, creative work that contributes to our community.

“Public Scholarship”, as defined by Imagining America, is: “…scholarly or creative activity that joins serious intellectual endeavor with a commitment to public practice and public consequence”.  

— “Scholarship in Public,” the Report of the Tenure Team Initiative of Imagining America

Our program launches in Fall of 2016…and we couldn’t be more excited! Sparking lateral connections inspire students to connect concepts and theories to real-world practice. As we develop this new program, we challenge ourselves as a learning community, to stretch our thinking, be bold with our vision, curious in our inquiry and daring about the ways in which we design learning and deliver student-centered instruction in the visual and performing arts. Engagement is at the heart of the Creative Corridor. It is our portal, connecting us to our community and diverse publics in ways that align to the broader mission of Cornish.