Category Archives: feedback
Critique Is Creative: The Critical Response Process in Theory and Action
By Liz Lerman and John Borstel (2022)
Devised by choreographer Liz Lerman in 1990, Critical Response Process (CRP) is an internationally recognized method for giving and getting feedback on creative works in progress. In this first in-depth study of CRP, Lerman and her long-term collaborator John Borstel describe in detail the four-step process, its origins and principles. The book also includes essays on CRP from a wide range of contributors. With insight, ingenuity, and the occasional challenge, these practitioners shed light on the applications and variations of CRP in the contexts of art, education, and community life. Critique is Creative examines the challenges we face in an era of reckoning and how CRP can aid in change-making of various kinds.
With contributions from: Bimbola Akinbola, Mark Callahan, Isaac Gómez, Lekelia Johnson, Elizabeth Johnson Levine, Lawrence Edelson, Carlos Lopez-Real, Cristóbal Martínez, Gesel Mason, Cassie Meador, Rachel Miller Jacobs, Kevin Ormsby, CJay Philip, Kathryn Prince, Sean Riley, Charles C. Smith, Shula Strassfeld, Phil Stoesz, Gerda van Zelm, Jill Waterhouse, Rebekah West
Assessment in Creative Disciplines: Quantifying and Qualifying the Aesthetic
Assessment in Creative Disciplines: Quantifying and Qualifying the Aesthetic explores creativity and its assessment using easy-to-grasp concepts; concrete examples of arts education and assessment models and theories, including digital education models and e-portfolios; and case studies to form a blueprint that administrators, educators, practitioners, researchers, and students can use to assess endeavors in art, dance, design, and music, both on an individual basis and as a collective (course, cohort, department, program, etc.).
Dancers Talking Dance
By Larry Lavender (1996)
Dancers Talking Dance describes how to teach students to formulate critical responses to the dances they see, create, and perform. Written for teachers and dancers at all levels, the book outlines a five-step, systematic approach to critical evaluation. To bring the approach to life the author interweaves practical, how-to examples with explanations of the theories underlying each step. Readers will learn how to help students observe, describe, analyze, write, and talk more effectively about dances and other works of art.
Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well
Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen have spent the past fifteen years working with corporations, nonprofits, governments, and families to determine what helps us learn and what gets in our way. In Thanks for the Feedback, they explain why receiving feedback is so crucial yet so challenging, offering a simple framework and powerful tools to help us take on life’s blizzard of offhand comments, annual evaluations, and unsolicited input with curiosity and grace. They blend the latest insights from neuroscience and psychology with practical, hard-headed advice. Thanks for the Feedback is destined to become a classic in the fields of leadership, organizational behavior, and education.
Posted in feedback, psychology
Critical Response Process
Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process is a multi-step, group system for giving and receiving useful feedback on creative processes and artistic works-in-progress. This book offers a detailed introduction to the Process, beginning with its three roles and four core steps.
Art Subjects
Nearly every artist under the age of fifty in the United States today has a Master of Fine Arts degree. Howard Singerman’s thoughtful study is the first to place that degree in its proper historical framework and ideological context. Arguing that where artists are trained makes a difference in the forms and meanings they produce, he shows how the university, with its disciplined organization of knowledge and demand for language, played a critical role in the production of modernism in the visual arts. Now it is shaping what we call postmodernism: like postmodernist art, the graduate university stresses theory and research over manual skills and traditional techniques of representation.
Singerman, who holds an M.F.A. in sculpture as well as a Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies, is interested in the question of the artist as a “professional” and what that word means for and about the fashioning of artists. He begins by examining the first campus-based art schools in the 1870s and goes on to consider the structuring role of women art educators and women students; the shift from the “fine arts” to the “visual arts”; the fundamental grammar of art laid down in the schoolroom; and the development of professional art training in the American university. Singerman’s book reveals the ways we have conceived of art in the past hundred years and have institutionalized that conception as atelier activity, as craft, and finally as theory and performance.