Navigating Endings
from a seafaring perspective
Scenes from KCAI’s Printmaking studio, August 2023.
This week marked the end of my 45th semester of teaching. I’ve had a 21-year career, so far, in teaching at the college level. Except for about eight years (some of which I was too young to remember well), my entire life has been structured within the rhythm of the academic year.
The academic-year cycle where I live designates September and January as times of beginnings, and May and December as times for endings. However, as an artist who teaches other artists, I find that these demarcations of time on the calendar are not actually hard starts or stops for learning and making. Rather, the beginning and ending of a semester each signify a different moment of possibility.
“If the school is the river, the student is the boat, and my curriculum is the current connecting the two.”
Laura Crehuet Berman: Strata 7, Relief monoprint, 25 x 25 inches, 2017.
Funfetti! The End-of-Semester Exhibition at KCAI Printmaking, December 2023.
I have taught a year-long senior-level course within a Bachelor of Fine Arts curriculum for over a dozen years. More than any other year at the college level, the senior year contains external concerns beyond the control of the student and faculty. Life beyond school becomes an ever-increasing consideration, and there is heightened involvement within the extended community through participation in exhibitions, applications for opportunities, hands-on internships, and professional goals-oriented work outside the classroom.
These external matters evolve into essential guides to the educational experience as well. If the school is the river, the student is the boat, and my curriculum is the current that connects and guides these. Everything else is either inside or alongside this shared stream of experience.
Along the way, some things help buoy the boat, others can impede its path, distractions appear from the sidelines of the river banks, and some things may speed, slow, or even change the boat’s direction entirely.
This fall I have guided another group of amazing young artists to find, build, and maintain the tools they need to steer their own creative ships. As the semester comes to a close, I am reminded that this is not an ending point. The boats, the river, and the current itself are always there. Those involved in teaching and learning, especially in inventive fields, know that any of our current locations–no matter how traditionally they are regarded as endings or beginnings–are inherently good places to push off from in order to navigate the next adventure.
My students and I (relieved, tired & happy) on our last day of class this fall.