Mission & Goals
Mission
The New Hampshire Institute of Art’s Liberal Arts curriculum fosters the overall enrichment and growth of its students as it complements, unfolds, and ramifies their work as artists. Entering students at the Institute complete at least two semesters of composition courses. The foundations writing courses are designed to inculcate thinking and revising tendencies in our students with an eye toward more creative competent written expression. As sophomores, students undertake ongoing, comprehensive instruction in art history that provides a solid background in artists, cultures and movements and that accords students contemporary and historical contexts for their work. The Institute general studies program also balances and scaffolds courses in social science, literature, humanities, history, science, related arts, and philosophy. The related arts requirement aims to expand student awareness of artistry outside of the studio. The philosophy course (which students take in their final year) may feed or foil the work in Senior Studio as students strive to locate and express their artistic visions and aesthetics.
In keeping with the Institute’s mission to prepare emerging artists for the real world and for a lifelong engagement with the arts, the liberal arts curriculum prepares students to present themselves and their work professionally by developing their habits and enjoyment of reflection, research, and expression. The Liberal Arts Chairperson and faculty play a role in guiding and assessing senior Capstone work, and are integral to the outcomes of student artist statements that accompany the valedictory studio and study requirements of senior year. The Liberal Arts program supports excellence in teaching and often recruits arts-oriented scholars who are highly qualified educators and active community members. They provide instruction that balances student development of skills and sensibilities.
The liberal arts curriculum and pedagogical tendencies thrive in the Institute’s small learning culture, offering low teacher-student ratios and concomitant opportunities for student-constructed learning. Ultimately, opportunities for personal reflection, critical thinking, academic research, and active student engagement underscore all liberal arts courses at the Institute, ensuring students a robust general education that informs and radiates into and beyond the significant touchstones of art making.
Goals
- To encourage constructive, creative exchange and collaboration between fine arts and liberal arts by supporting the critique process in studio and liberal arts.
- To offer bibliographic instruction that introduces students to the effective access, evaluation, and successful use of information from a variety of sources.
- To integrate ongoing library instruction throughout the liberal arts curriculum by creating a forum for the collaboration of library staff and liberal arts faculty.
- To foster the understanding of the legal and ethical use of information and to promote academic integrity through universal faculty emphasis, student signed contracts, and the use (with support of the Academic Support Center) of drafting and revising across the curriculum.
- To develop and archive of student writing, in conjunction with an assessment program, scored against rubrics and evaluated by a team of skilled readers, that will scrutinize students in each year of the program and highlight areas of competence and weakness in the general education program in order to foster and protect collegiate writing.
- To assist students in developing their personal and professional voices in writing, in oral presentations, and in dialogue.
- To provide an art history curriculum that grounds student knowledge of western art history, cultures, and movements and that offers rich opportunities for the study of a variety of specialized upper level art history courses.
- To develop and administer pre and post tests in Art History that will be scaled by evaluation criteria and used to assess program effectiveness.
- To provide upper level liberal arts courses in literature, social science, and humanities that cover the historical contexts of movements, ideas, thinkers and creators.
- To offer a variety of courses in science (quantitative reasoning, anatomy, biology, and earth science) that will be useful for the students’ professional futures, relevant to their studio work, and of significance to their lives in a global society.
- To encourage the examination of contemporary issues of identity, race, ethnicity, and gender in liberal arts courses, and to offer individual courses dedicated to these emphases.
- To offer courses in psychology, science, philosophy, and humanities that satisfy the requirements of both the general education and the art education programs and that effectively serve mixed groups of their respective students.
- To create a high quality senior Capstone process and product that includes a broad cross section of contributors and evaluators from both liberal and studio arts and that serves to punctuate a meaningful, challenging, and celebratory conclusion to the liberal and studio arts achievements of our students.
Objectives
- Ability to demonstrate knowledge, critical thinking, and depth of reflection through informed, constructive, and sensitive discourse in liberal and studio art critiques.
- Ability to perform research and writing in liberal and studio arts courses that demonstrate an informed inquiry into and dialogue about art and ideas, movements and cultures.
- Ability effectively to access, evaluate, and use information from a variety of sources and demonstrate accurate use of relevant research styles, including MLA and APA.
- Capacity to perform a broad, standard range of writing assignments in the year-long, introductory, writing curriculum that reveals personal reflection, critical thinking, process analysis, and academic research.
- Ability successfully to perform work typical to the discipline of art history, including slide identification; deduction, from image, of the period, maker, and or geographical context of a piece; analytical thinking, speaking, and writing based in the traditions andlexicon of art historical discourse and scholarship.
- Ability to analyze and meaningfully respond (in writing and in speaking) to texts and images from a variety of perspectives, disciplines, cultures, periods, genres, and arts media.
- Ability to recognize and use elements of scientific reasoning and analysis through practical application.
- Ability to identify and address topics of ecological concern for humanity, other organisms, and the environment.
- Ability to identify, analyze, and speak to some of the political and personal issues of identity, including race, ethnicity, and gender.
- Capacity to produce a quality Capstone Essay that demonstrates depth of critical and personal inquiry and research into art, ideas, and self; and that establishes the roots of an authorial voice that is both authentic and compelling.
