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?”