As an academic year like no other comes to a close, we spoke to faculty about the techniques they used to take a Kenyon education out of Gambier and into the world.
For her “Intermediate Modern Dance” class, Craig-Quijada borrowed an idea from dance-filmmaker Mitchell Rose, who adapted the “exquisite corpse” method often used to compose collective written stories into an “exquisite dance corps.” She instructed her dance students to film themselves at home, following only two rules: 1) Your movement phrase starts where the previous person left off, and 2) you must incorporate an “arm gesture” phrase, so there is a theme common to all of the phrases. Lindsey Conant ’21 edited the final dance video.
“All sorts of creative ideas have been floating around about how to teach movement classes online — or how to develop meaningful projects that keep us engaged and connected in ways other than dancing together in the same space,” Craig-Quijada said.
Turner constructed an innovative apparatus to film herself demonstrating lab experiments — an elastic headband with a camera attached, so that both of her hands would be free and physics students could observe the experiment from her point of view. In the below video, Turner demonstrates a simple experiment involving x-rays passed through a very thin sheet of pure nickel foil.
Turner’s students were able to have the same experience of analyzing the results of experiments, minus the time required to set up the sometimes tedious and repetitive procedures. Turner’s pre-recorded videos allowed her students — located all the way from the West Coast to Denmark — to learn on their own schedules.
For his introductory “Musical Styles” course, Sanders prepared video lectures with audio examples, which could be viewed asynchronously to allow students flexibility. In the below video, Sanders discusses the sonata-allegro form and the composer C.P.E. Bach.
Even after in-person classes are able to resume, Sanders may maintain some elements of the pedagogy he experimented with during remote learning. Noting that his students did particularly well on a certain music exam, Sanders theorized that having access to video versions of his lectures that could be watched multiple times helped students learn at their own pace.