Structuring a Catalytic Arts Education Program: The Saturday Program at Cooper Union

With Marina Gutierrez, Aisha Bell, Charles Fambro and Claudio Nolasco

The Saturday Program at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Art and Science was founded in 1968 by undergraduate students interested in reinvigorating Peter Cooper’s vision of an institution that would serve the “immigrant and working classes of New York City.” The Program continues to grow as a self-sustaining and self-renewing community of creative minds.

Three-fifths of the core staff first came to the Program as public high-school students; they attained college degrees and now offer their leadership to current students as professional artists as well as administrators. It is perhaps this continuum of involvement that distinguishes the Saturday Program among arts-education paradigms: It is a community built to serve itself, rather than a program aimed at reaching “out.” It is a demographically and intellectually diverse gathering of young people and their mentors, passionate about the artistic growth that rigorous training makes possible.

Cooper undergraduate students who teach studio arts classes engage in a crucial collaborative process: Pairs or teams of student teachers create curricula that speak to their own practices and interests in areas of composition and technique. A nonhierarchical organizational culture in the Program administration facilitates this nurturance of individual vision in tandem with commitment to the Program goal of guiding students toward higher education, and high expectations of their artistic selves.

The pool of public high-school students at the Saturday Program is a cross-section of skill levels, cultures, interests and aims. This diversity, combined with the interplay of ideas among student teachers, yields artistic work that is both highly divergent (with regard to conceptual approaches to the work) and highly developed.

Undergraduate students work under the guidance of the Curriculum Coordinator to design courses each semester in the program’s five disciplines: drawing, painting, sculpture, graphic design and architecture. The Portfolio Preparation class for seniors follows a similar structure and is co-taught by the Program Director along with undergraduate student teachers. Each student teacher suggests projects to facilitate the learning of concepts in composition and technique. Often these ideas find their genesis in current problems faced by student-teachers in their own artistic practice.

“Seeing young people transform from students to peers is amazing. Having students gain voice and agency, and begin to define their process, is wonderful. The social structure of Cooper Union’s Saturday Program allows for community building that becomes a circle extending beyond the confines of the campus,” says the Saturday Program team. Above, a student teacher (l.) works with a Saturday Program student on portfolio preparation.

This work requires empowering student teachers with no prior experience to succeed as facilitators in the classroom. In preparatory meetings with the Curriculum Coordinator, student teachers are asked to reflect on their own experience as art students. A student teacher may be asked to discuss a piece of her own artwork, for example: “What concepts did you need to understand — and/or what technical skill was needed — in order to achieve this composition?” By asking student teachers to consider their own processes, we cultivate student educators capable of bridging the space between envisioned product and effective process. By transposing their ideas onto the reality of the classroom, student teachers can fit instruction to the students, designing a workable class plan.

Talking through these goals involves troubleshooting according to constraints of time and factoring in the chaotic potentiality of the theater of the classroom. Breaking down all the steps needed to reach an instructional goal brings these first-time educators into a methodology very much aligned with practices of student-centered, constructivist pedagogy. After framing aesthetic, conceptual and technical issues in this step-by-step approach, the process is considered successful if all students in the class can access the instruction and workshop materials through a sequence of experience, reflection, investigation and application.

A salient feature of this mode of working is the challenge of balancing varied objectives brought to the table by each member of the 2-5-person teaching team. Fashioning a collaborative pedagogy in this way fills the studio/classroom with discourse — sometimes dissonant, always engaging — that yields excitingly divergent visions in a body of student work crafted with a complexity of considerations. Student teachers submit detailed lesson/workshop plans as well as evaluation documents for each session they facilitate, providing a method of gauging progress toward instructional goals.

As a way to access meta-cognitive aspects of the creative process and to prepare students for higher education, the Saturday Program Writing Project brings poets and other creative writers to facilitate workshops using text as a key medium. Student writing ranges from contemplations of their own compositions to abstract pieces of prose poetry, ekphrastic work (writing in response to a work of art), or performances featuring multimedia projections during our semi-annual reading/exhibition.

Our goal is to educate young artists toward engaging in creative discourse as potential peers of their “teachers.” The Saturday Program thus prioritizes craft and collaboration as primary paths to facilitating new competencies in youth artists.

In preparation for the MICA Convening, the Saturday Program Staff engaged in conversation around several key aspects of our practice as presented in the foregoing text. Below please find our reflections.

On Our Students

Seeing young people transform from students to peers is amazing. Having students gain voice and agency, and begin to define their process, is wonderful. The social structure of SP allows for community building that becomes a circle extending beyond the confines of the campus.

On Undergraduate Students as Teachers

To teach is to learn twice. — A fortune cookie posted in the Saturday Program office

The fact that many alums teach helps define us.

Student teachers are the cornerstone of the program. The high-school students feel comfortable with them and like the relaxed learning environment. There is an understanding among undergraduate student-teachers that these high-school students may soon be their peers. It defuses a lot of the tensions between generations, hierarchies, etc. that you find in typical high schools.

Undergraduate student teachers are given freedom and responsibility in the development of their teaching practice. Students shape the curriculum and class structure based on their experience as students, often choosing a lesson they found to be the most successful for their practice and referencing things they themselves may have recently learned. They are able to provide even more insight if they are former students in the program.

As an alumna of the Saturday Program, many of the lessons I learned as a student have reappeared in my own practice as a teacher. — General Coordinator Aisha Bell

Our classes are team-taught. Teams consist of 2-5 teachers. Teams meet and discuss ideas for lesson plans. Team members who have taught the class in previous years discuss what has worked in the past and what has not worked. This model is also used in our staff workshops, where the program director and all staff convene with undergraduates to refine the process, semester after semester.

This is unique because there is a sense of ownership. Students do more than assist or follow instruction; they create the instruction and are able to share their knowledge with their peers.

I began as part of the student collective in '79-'81. The privilege of longevity has allowed the initial vision/action to build into a 40 year creative collaboration. — Program Director Marina Gutierrez

On Collaboration

The Saturday Program is fluid and open to many agendas and practices.

The openness of the program is what's kept me here; there is enough change and possibility to keep things fresh and interesting. — Portfolio Prep Teacher/Office Manager Claudio Nolasco

It can be a struggle to collaborate — to accept another perspective, to explain oneself while experimenting, to constructively critique a co-worker, or accept critique, to respect without full understanding, to fail and adjust and continue and learn the difference between blame & responsibility. To invent a great plan that flounders. To be sensitive to students who surprise you. Our structure has room for individuals to contribute their special, particular knowledge. The insight developed through years of experience and the unique vision of the beginner enhance rather than cancel each other. It’s an alternative paradigm of efficiency — each person is respected for what they alone can contribute or imagine.

Our Curriculum Coordinator gives guidance rather than prescribing a specific mode of learning.

My goal is to share experience, help [student teachers] organize their thoughts, build up their confidence, and [encourage] them through rough patches. — Curriculum Coordinator Charles Fambro

On Arts Education as a Primarily Creative Practice, in Harmony with a Diverse Community Agenda

It is important for me to see students learn about their potential and get a broader understanding of their choices in the arts field. It was my time in the Saturday Program that convinced me to become a professional artist, and demonstrated that it was possible to make a career of something you enjoy. As the general coordinator I work with students as an advisor when it comes to the college application process. I make myself available for discussion, advice, information and motivation. At the end of the year when I am compiling my list of colleges our students will be attending there is a sense of accomplishment. — General Coordinator Aisha Bell

It is important for our children to view the arts as an important part of their future. Possibilities must be made apparent because artists are responsible for shaping visual perception and documenting our existence. The arts enable visual thinking and creative problem-solving, two skills that enable insightful and intelligent leadership skills crucial to all of our communities.

SP is Arts Practice with a sense of urgency & the necessity for excellence. Whether or not a HS senior receives support throughout the application process may make college possible or impossible: His/her life may be forever changed.

Nonetheless, at SP we try to keep the “social-worker attitude” out of the classroom. Many other arts-ed programs that we have observed do contribute to the life experience of participants, though few change the course of lives. Most aren't run by the community they serve, have short term commitments, and don't expect young participants to eventually become peers. Even when their approaches are not missionary, they are often hierarchical: “us & them”, not “us for us.” In these ways the Saturday Program is distinct; our goals and commitments are long-term, as we are a program co-created by the members of the communities that we serve.

On The Studio Process

SP differs from other programs in that our expectations tend to be higher, in terms of how much ground we attempt to cover formally and academically. All of our assignments are college-level, even if the students themselves are not initially operating on that level. Our goal is to get to that level of work.

One of the most important and unique aspects of our studio process is the extensive amount of time students have — six hours each Saturday — to explore their craft. This allows for huge jumps in the students’ learning curve. It also permits adequate time for reflection, review and critique

On Our Relationship to Our Host Institution

Cooper has a particular conceptual idea about Art and its role. This puts it in a specific space that is very closed and specialized. Cooper Art as a higher-education institution has a very specific agenda often oriented toward goals unrelated to our raison d’etre: getting “underprivileged” teens an education. We operate at different points in students’ development and as such have different concerns.

Cooper Union's initial goal at inception was to create a school for all and make education accessible, hence free. However, entrance to the school is based on skill, and public schools do not provide our students with the tools. The majority of students in Cooper tend to come from some level of privilege. For recruitment, we send student teachers to underfunded schools to recruit students who may not normally have access to a program like ours. As a result this program is responsible for a large percentage of the students of color in the Cooper Union student body.

This essay is part of the Community Arts Convening & Research Project, 2008. It was selected and reviewed by the project’s Editorial Board: Ron Bechet, Xavier University of Louisiana; Lori Hager, University of Oregon; Marina Gutierrez, Cooper Union; Ken Krafchek, Maryland Institute College of Art; Sonia Mañjon, California College of the Arts; Amalia Mesa-Bains, California State University Monterey Bay; Paul Teruel, Columbia College Chicago; and Stephani Woodson, Arizona State University.

Karma Mayet Johnson is a performance artist and a writing liaison who brings poets to work with young visual artists at the Cooper Union Saturday Program. She teaches writing at Medgar Evers College, CUNY and Rutgers University.

Original CAN/API publication: June 2008