The beauty of a liberal arts college is that it challenges students to take courses in subject areas outside their major. Here at Keene State College the Integrated Studies Program (ISP) does just that especially with art, theatre and dance classes.
KSC Events Scheduling Manager and Class of 2003 alumnus Will Howell got his degree in theatre and dance with specialization in acting and directing. Howell said, “I wholeheartedly feel that an education that includes the arts is vital to the liberal arts education in general. It’s important to any individual’s education when they get into the real world and are interacting with humanity and society. I think the types of skills that you learn in those types of courses are critical in any situation and I’ve definitely found that to be true in my experiences.”
Howell said that his experience as an actor gave him the skills to interact with all different types of people.
“Particularly with theater you spend a lot of time with character development, from an acting perspective you’re given a script, you’re playing a role, you’re doing a lot of work trying to flesh out who this individual your playing is . You’re creating a backstory, figuring out how they move and how they might react in a certain situation. You’re making a lot of this up but, it’s also based on reality from your own experiences with other people. So if you’re put in that situation or dealing with a certain type of person, because of the work you’ve done your going to have familiarity with that type of environment and situation and would then have insight on how to interact with those individuals. It’s really a matter of the stage bending into the real world,” Howell said.
KSC Associate Professor of Art History Stephen Lucey said that for example while students are taught how to read shakespeare there’s no class that teaches students how to look at the world.
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“There’s no class that teaches how to make sense of fashion and what we see in the world and how to look at an advertisment or how to go a museum and enjoy one’s self and develop an appreciation for things that are beautiful and provocative which is what art can be,” Lucey said.
Lucey said that he believes the skills you learn in the arts are just as important as mathematical skills.
“It’s about thinking creatively and coming up with creative solutions. The process of art makes you face an intellectual problem like, ‘How do i go about this?’ and coming out with a method of approach and thinking about what the process is going to be in a certain way or thinking that is very different than solving a geometric problem in math. I think we can all benefit from different modes of thinking and I think that’s ultimately what the arts bring apart from the beauty and sort of what have you it really is a different way of thinking,” Lucey said.
KSC senior and dance major Miranda Ronan agreed.
“ I took dance is a way of knowing my sophomore year and it was kind of cool taking that class because you were with a lot of different people who were all different kinds of majors not just dance majors or like art people and we had a few communication major and we had a few science people. It was kind of cool to see all of them creative movement because they have never taken dance before so it was cool to observe them and see how they create movement,” Ronan said.
Since all students are required to take an arts class, students are encouraged to find a class that they can relate to their major.
“I was talking to a graphic design student who had taken an environmental science course, and was kind of questioning it, so we were really talking about the ISP program here and he said, ‘You know, I had to this environmental science course” and I said, ‘ Well, how great is that, what if you work as a designer for Green Peace one day, you have in-roads, you understand your client, you understand what’s important in the world. Through general education and through the ISP program were hoping to kind of touch on all those things but I really do think of it [ the arts] as a different way of thinking and exposing students to not only different things in terms of content but different ways of thinking that can only enrich us,” Lucey said.
Kendall Pope can be contacted at kpope@kscequinox.com
