An article about Goddard.

Check out this great article about Goddard

September 4, 2011

Goddard College's Unconventional Path to Survival

A 'low residency' program brings students together, but only for one week

By Scott Carlson

In the Chronicle of Higher Education 

A few excerpts 

"Someone like Rod Crossman, at his stage in life and with his professional success, doesn't often seek a way to reinvent himself. Yet Mr. Crossman—a painter, an assistant professor, and an artist in residence at Indiana Wesleyan University—felt that he was merely churning out pretty work to hang on gallery walls, increasingly feeling a schism between where his career had taken him and where his passion was telling him to go.

"My art practice had become marooned in the place where it was not connected to the world," he says. "There were issues that my students were facing, and I didn't think I had the tools to help them navigate those problems. Some of the issues they were facing were just the challenges of the world that we live in." He wanted an interdisciplinary M.F.A. to reinvigorate his work at Indiana Wesleyan, where he has taught for 30 years."

I have said it so many times on this blog. Goddard is often about reinventing yourself. 

""The students seemed to be of a higher caliber, seemed to be more self-directed, confident, prepared," says Mr. Byerly, who now works as an archivist and college historian in the library. But these students were, at the core, the same kind of person he was—someone who found Goddard when traditional education failed him. "The types of individuals who are drawn to this—an education that gives them a say in what they do and empowers them in a way that they might never have been empowered before—those individuals are still the same.""