“Lots of people forget that learning was fun for them,” Sifuentes added.

LEARNING THROUGH DOING

While Sifuentes’s seminar is almost exclusively activity-based learning, most of the art-making freshman seminars balance this component with comprehensive grounding in academic and theoretical learning.

Though Dramatic Arts Lecturer Remo F. Airaldi assigns readings to his students in “The Art and Craft of Acting,” he also asks them to keep a journal about their daily musings on performance art. Students are further required to attend showings at the American Repertory Theater.

In “Movement and Meaning: Dance Culture, and Identity in the 20th Century”—which also seeks to balance academic and creative approaches toward a given artform—students spent the first half of every seminar practicing movement exercises.

“When it comes to kinesthetic activity, you can only say so much in writing as opposed to experiencing it with your body.” said Shayna R.M. Skal ’13, who took the course last fall.

For her final project, Skal not only used theoretical readings from the course, but choreographed and performed a dance by using chance procedure, a method of choreography introduced in class.

Chance procedure involves developing short movement phrases in varying length and size and then performing them in random order—a strategy quite different from the strict choreography of ballet that Skal had trained in before coming to college.

“I was so used to classical ballet—you follow the beat, you have your accent on that counter note,” said Skal, who added that she had been apprehensive about performing a piece using such an unfamiliar method.

NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY

Even for someone like Skal, who had danced ballet before college, the Freshmen Seminar Program allows students of varying experiences to expand their horizons in the arts.

“The idea of a freshman seminar is that you can try something totally out of your comfort zone, something that you are not sure you are going to excel at whatsoever,” said Miriam E. Psychas ’13, who took the “Movement and Meaning” seminar.

Psychas, who likes to “dance for fun” but never studied the art in an academic setting, said she thought the seminar would be an “interesting way to look at something that I do so often in a totally different perspective.”

The seminars expose students to a wide range of traditions in the arts—and even the more experienced of the group said they benefit from the diversity.

Skal, who has trained in ballet since the age of four, said that the less-experienced students’ input during a class discussion of the ballet classic “The Rite of Spring” allowed her to view the subject with fresh perspective.