Methods of Teaching:  Introduction

For the faculty, one of the great attractions of BMC was the freedom to try out different teaching methods and be less constricted by formal requirements, examinations, etc. The facu lty meetings were focused often upon teaching as well as upon problems and concerns regarding specific students. The recollections of former students contain many references to the teaching and teachers, though without specific focus on the BMC educational philosophy.

Some teachers welcomed the opportunity, but others evidently did little to change their more traditional methods. The outstanding teachers, however, employed approaches quite different from the usual. Rice's Plato class, for one, was not about Plato's writings, but rather a carrying out of Plato's Socratic method in a group which consisted of new students, advanced students, and even faculty; people dropped in and out, took part or merely listened. Albers' Drawing and Werklehre classes represented his adaptation of courses he gave at the Bauhaus, originally for students specializing in design, the arts, etc. Again, his classes had a mixed composition, and some students repeated the classes more than once. Neither Rice nor Albers had anything "objective" in their methods which could be described as "grades," but each gained immense understanding of the students through their individualized approaches. Rice's teaching embodied the concept of helping students learn to think for themselves and Albers's method was to help students learn to see for themselves—for both, the underlying emphasis was on the individual experience and motivation within a discipline.

Other faculty in one way or another embodied, in their teaching, these and other concepts, and it can be said that there was a pervasive atmosphere that affected most of the faculty. For another dimension in the education, see The Role of the Arts, the first section.

 Robert Sunley