Monday, March 26, 2012
The first concurrent presentations included Brian Glassman's talk, "From Art School to Law School: Lessons for Visual Learners." He started us off with a visual exercise--to imagine and sketch the objects underneath a draped cloth. He then walked us through eight different topics and showed how he used paintings to teach each lesson. For example, he used several Degas paintings to discuss perspective; he used Calder wire scuplture to illustrate the reduction of an idea to its essential principles. Mary Beth Beazley commented on his use of a Seurat painting to tell how she used pointillism to teach her students about creating an argument: while the eye might combine a blue dot next to a red dot to create purple, a writer could not assume that a reader would combine a fact next to some law to create an argument.
Glassman's talk was a strong start to an excellent conference and illustrated nicely both how to reach visual learners AND how to incorporate one's interests into one's teaching to make it especially effective.