Susan Allen

I am dedicated to the notion of reflexive, interactive learning and teaching.  For arts studies, instruction needs to benefit the emerging artist in the dual contexts of self-expression and professional development. 

Any teaching of a subject needs to allow an active learner a valid position within the subject prior to embarking on any examination of the topic at hand.  I believe in eliminating any alienation between the learner and the information presented.  By facilitating discovery processes for the gathering and expression of materials available to each individual musician, I avoid traditional lecture/assessment models of learning.

As cultural paradigms change over time, artists need to be able to clearly and effectively understand their peculiar environs, and to express an artistic vision fluidly and cogently using the vernacular of current thought.  In this way, history and tradition can be acknowledged as a result of thought, process, event and a cultural reflection of a particular time.   If learners can be led to understand that we, as a culture and a civilization, and truly as human beings, are constantly undergoing change, and now, rapid and dramatic change, the potential for deeper learning can be expanded by facilitating a new educational perspective.  This perspective recognizes events, concepts and ideas in response to our environment and our cultural context.

Once a learner understands clearly that an instructor is only an authority by way of experience, the avenues for co-education have been opened.  A learner and instructor here may set forth the notion of examining a set of ideas or issues together, while the instructor, rather than delivering truths or platitudes, may guide the student toward avenues for research, thought, process and self-discovery.

Assessment, then, occurs similarly, through the experiential learning process of the student (which can be documented in narrative), and through the experiential teaching process of the instructor.  Ideally, the learning process reaches the instructor as strongly as it does the student.  Toward that end, the specific, individual needs of each learner need be taken under consideration as energies that contribute to the greater notion of learning as a way of being in the world.

This idea of co-learning harkens back to the ancient apprenticeship model, but with some modifications.  Here, the ‘teacher’ is not presumed to know more than the student but to be a person of experience who can share that firsthand knowledge with the student.  The ‘teacher’ is someone who has a foot in the current professional world of music, and someone who can translate that experience and the aura of it to the learning, developing professional.

This is not theory: it is a mindful pedagogy, full of personal and professional engagement, and the relationships it creates between student and teacher continue far beyond the college environment into the professional world.