Basic Information

Macaulay Honors College at Brooklyn College Seminar One
The Arts in New York City–Fall 2012
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 340:455 PM

3405 Boylan Hall

The “official” learning objectives of the course.
(We’ll see how we get to make them work!)

1. Explain the role of the artists, the arts, and artistic institutions in the lives of New York’s diverse citizens and the city itself.
2. Identify the key features of the different artistic forms studied in the class.
3. Construct clearly written and well-reasoned analyses of these art forms for multiple audiences (e.g., reviews, arguments, summaries, personal responses, blogs, etc.).
4. Analyze artistic forms for their formal qualities.
5. Formulate their own individual aesthetic values after having studied the City’s wide range of artistic expressions.

This class is the first of the interdisciplinary New York City-based seminars that make up the curriculum of Macaulay Honors College.  This is your first (and best!) opportunity to think about what it means to be a college student, especially an honors college student, in your era and your place.

The bulk of the class work will be thinking–but of course we’ll do plenty of reading, and even more writing, as well.  And talking, too.  Throughout the course we’ll try to be reflective not just about what we’re learning…but also about how we’re learning.

All the Macaulay seminars share some basic philosophical commonalities–and we really want to introduce them, and have you understand them, here from the start.

1. We want these courses to help you learn actively–not just passively receiving information, but creating and sharing and developing ideas of your own.
2. These courses will ask you to commit to presenting your work to a larger audience–including your classmates in the seminar and in all of Macaulay, but also to the world beyond the classroom.  You will be taking your place and sharing your voices in the wider community of scholars, explorers, inventors and creators throughout the world.
3. We will be asking you to work collaboratively, fulfilling different roles in different kinds of teams, and finding ways to fit your own individual strengths and abilities into a bigger picture.
4. These courses will be interdisciplinary in nature–meaning that we will ask you to think about what makes the traditional academic disciplines separate, and what unites them.  How does the distinction between (for example) English and History, or Chemistry and Physics, help us to understand the world…or how do these distinctions hinder us?