es090405 Dear Former Students: A professor asks his former students to be his board of advisers   

For years I have watched people who used to be art students at the UW as they became good citizens as well as fine artists, craftspeople, designers, teachers and professionals in various important functions in our communities. I need their advice on ELPO.

©2009 Bill Ritchie - 1231 Words - 3 Pages

Dear Former Students,

Writing to you is timely in the sense that I considered doing this for decades, literally. Since the time you were in college, and you made contributions to my life in ways you may never have fully realized, I knew the day would come I would write this letter to you, my former students.

You helped me when I was a professor learning teaching, the arts, technologies and politics of the walled-in institutions of universities, museums and art galleries.

When I left the UW campus, you continued to give support in the ways you played your own tune, making marvelous lives for yourselves based, maybe, on things you picked up in school when I knew you. I might flatter myself and think I taught you some things that you needed for your successes, but I know better.

The truth is we had a community going in college, and the essence of community leaked out into life after the university. I never shut down my community work, and I am writing to you at this time because I have reached a stage in my professional life that’s something like a post-doctoral stage. If there were a university for me, I’d be boning up for my finals.

You, my formers students—having been around the block many more than a few times—would be my examination board. If I pass the next hurdle—in your collective judgement—I think we will experience a great satisfying feeling to add to our lives’ works.

Here is the deal. To reach the goal of a great teacher, I need and want to take my offerings online, in ways and shapes and forms apposite to these times. I will teach printmaking online; and I will do so in a what is called—by academics—blended learning. It’s a mix of distance learning and face-to-face workshops. I’ve been working on it since 1980.

It has been an interesting goal to work toward, and the idea is rooted in our years at the UW. What I need now is a board of advisors—people like yourself who are artists, craftspeople and designers who have proven yourselves in ways surpassing perhaps even your own expectations. I think I need a core of a dozen former students with your experience and insights as professionals, community servants, members of nuclear families and homeowners and—a few of you—parents.

A board of advisors can help me refine factors that teachers and professors need to sort out the right things to bring our following. The arts have important contributions to solve the nation’s and the world’s problems in the name of creativity. Distance learning is creative, and blended learning in higher education is a way to bring arts education to more people.

Looking back, I think we met at a fortunate moment, you and I, when it wasn’t so difficult to have traditional art studio classrooms. We had it all, I think—safe, relatively inexpensive and open-ended learning and productive facilities. I made the most of the freedom and security of my nineteen years at the UW.

Today, when I set foot on campus or hear the stories of art teachers, I feel like Rip Van Winkle, wakening to a world so vastly different they make me go back to sleep. I think, compared to the old days, teaching art is nightmarish.

It doesn’t have to be that way. I don’t think people—at any stage of their lives, whether they are traditional-age college students or people late in their lives—have to give up their jobs, move away or make long commutes, and spend inordinate amounts of time and resources to study and produce in the printmaking domain. And I would try not to teach people to do things that will require sacrifices of money for oversized equipment and unnecessary baggage typical of 20^th Century printmaking.

You can help this enterprise, to make printmaking online real, get it out and on the street as it were. You can help me by examining my plan, advising me, and connecting me with other people and agents of change who want to develop the best parts of what we launched in college and have practiced over the past forty years in our own ways.

You may be wondering, “What do you want?” Have a meeting?

That would be nice, if we can agree that what I am doing justifies taking your time.

What would be the focus of the meeting?

Money, undoubtedly.

Do I want your money? No, you’ve paid enough, I think, but Other Peoples’ Money (OPM) is the goal I have in mind.

What is the money for? Blended learning as a solid, credible offering takes money to shape into ways that fit the expectations of potential learners. The details take time, and specialists who can do the work will be paid in the course of making blended learning printmaking work.

It is with a tinge of guilt and remorse that I have not kept in close contact with you, seldom attending art openings, limiting my social life, and not publishing my work so most former students do not know what I’m up to. I wish you did, but it all takes time; and, for you, school was out decades ago.

Schoolish matters don’t concern you so much, for only a handful of you are teachers, and only a few of you have kids in schools; you are probably more concerned over the high costs and outcomes than being involved in talking higher education or distance learning with your old professor.

Since the year I started teaching—1966—my philosophy has been that education is mankind’s most enduring and—speaking of the language of our times—recession-proof industry. I’m glad I took on that mantra, because I feel like someone just starting out, like a freshman—on a new experience. The Rip Van Winkle effect isn’t so bad, the way I see it. It’s fun, in fact.

I want to share it with you. I want to talk about how, for example, Second Life—the current pop virtual world—might be a way to teach printmaking. If you were on my board of advisors, you could either prove I’m wrong or you could see this idea has something to offer you, personally, and to the community at large.

I’m a hundred words over my limit of writing a thousand a day, so I must end with a request: communicate with me on this subject, blended learning printmaking for the future. How would you proceed, if you were me?

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About the Author: Professor Bill Ritchie taught printmaking and media arts who took early retirement to start a learning, research and production company. His goal is a teaching studio for the 21^st Century printmaker, blending printmaking and digital arts. Code-named Emeralda: Learn Printmaking Online (ELPO) it is comprised of three elements: A mini-etching press, periodic meetings, and a digital game-based interface.