Liberal Arts
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Lori Landay, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Liberal Arts Department"In Language of Film I give students a three-part project. Their first assignment is to write an original screenplay of a scene or short-short film, and write a paper about it. Next they storyboard their screenplay and write a paper about that. In the third assignment, we improvise a scene and shoot some footage, which they edit together on their laptops; then they write a paper about editing. Students learn about how people make choices, and film scoring students gain insight into the directors with whom they have to communicate. It's probably the most exciting thing I've done at Berklee."
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DJ Hatfield, Assistant Professor
DEPARTMENT : Liberal Arts Department"What it means to be a good musician is more than technical proficiency. One of the things I think we can really offer is time to reflect and work through what it might mean to be a musician in contemporary society. Not all of us talk about music in our classes, and that's because a lot of what it means to be a good musician goes beyond music: it has to do with what it means to be a thinking person. I'd like to think of what we do not as a supplement, but as something that can really add to the ability of our students to think about where they can go as musicians."
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Ross Bresler, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT : Liberal Arts Department"Art history is a required course at Berklee, and it's just human nature for students—who are here to study music—to wonder how it's relevant to them. But within a week or two they start to realize that at the core of it, what all these people were doing—whether thousands of years ago or just last week—is exactly what they're doing now: figuring out how to channel their passion and curiosity into creating something."
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Joseph Coroniti, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Liberal Arts Department"Given the competitive nature of the music industry, students need to speak and write articulately. Writing about literature and drama helps them with their lyric writing and their ability to promote themselves as music professionals. Thinking critically about other art forms teaches them to connect with others and to discover and express new ideas."
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Gary Miller, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT : Liberal Arts Department"You get students from all over the place. Last year we were talking about Occupied France during the war, Vichy France. Do people collaborate, do they resist? I had a student who was French, and his grandfather faced that very question. As I recall, his grandfather was terrified. Once we were talking about the '20s in Germany, where there was hyperinflation. The government was printing ever-larger denominations, like one trillion marks. A student brought in a whole bunch of this money. We were passing it around and looking at it."
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"I have been teaching the Japanese language for more than 10 years. My Berklee students are all really interested in Japanese culture and language. I think most of them want to go to Japan. And another thing is they have Japanese friends here, and they want to be able to communicate to their friends. Every semester I have at least two or three students who have boyfriends or girlfriends who are Japanese. That's the reason they come to the class. They will study for one semester, and then when they have a vacation they will go to Japan and see their girlfriends' and boyfriends' parents. I think it's a good incentive to learn a language!"
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Ron Clark, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT : Liberal Arts Department"I hope that students are able to apply these lessons to future tasks without my guidance. I make connections to real-life writing that students will need to do for their careers, such as cover letters, reports, scholarship applications, and press kit materials. They need to see that writing a good essay is really the same as writing a good cover letter."
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Rekha Menon, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Liberal Arts Department"I've always been interested in the interdisciplinary nature of the arts, and at Berklee I have the opportunity to integrate music, dance, and visual art and teach courses such as Indian Art, Music and Dance, Asian Art, and Global Perspectives in Post-Modern Art. Music doesn't stand alone, but works together with visual art and dance, with its emphasis on breaking down the categorical boundaries between 'distinct' art forms. The interdisciplinary nature of my courses gives students the opportunity to see how art history, music, dance, and philosophy are mutually related."
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Sally Blazar, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Liberal Arts Department"Especially with first-year students, a lot of what I'm doing in addition to teaching English is introducing them to college, to a different way of thinking and interacting with others. I have a background in ESL, as well as literature. This background has led me to approach language—in academic essays, in literature, in speaking—as a means of communicating."
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Douglas Kohn, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Liberal Arts Department"I look for readings that are interesting both to me and hopefully to my students. I won't use anything in class that I don't think is well written. In the literature classes, I tend to draw from the literary end of popular fiction. I find something contemporary, then make the connection to a classic. So, for example, if I wanted to teach Oedipus I would find a modern version, then go back to the original."
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