Faculty members and upper-level students from the Music, Dance, and Drama Divisions. assembled in front of the first-year college students in Colloquium class. Each arrived with one to three prepared pieces, a minute or two long. Without knowing what the others would be presenting, one by one the students and faculty performed their pieces, first solo, and then together in different combinations. There were successes and some humorous outtakes. Then the audience gave direction as to when the performers should repeat, speed up, slow down, enter, change text, and the like. As the mixing and matching went on, by the end of an hour the concept of artistic collaboration had been vividly illustrated, along with life skills such as negotiation, listening, and expressing opinions.

“I’m really looking forward to working on our own [collaborative] project,” one student said after watching the inspiring performances. “I wasn’t sure what to expect from Colloquium,” he said. “It is one of my favorite classes.” 

Colloquium creates an environment in which teachers get to know students as people.

Colloquium is based on a course model offered at many traditional liberal-arts colleges called the Freshman Year Experience. Many such courses are one or two semesters long and designed to help new college students develop the necessary academic and social skills necessary for the transitional first year. In 1994, Juilliard offered its own modified version of the Freshman Year Experience, calling it Colloquium. Now the course is required of all first-time college students and is designed to help them develop the academic and communication skills essential to succeed as students and, eventually, as professionals.

After seven years it was time to evaluate Colloquium’s successes and failures in order to improve it. The review process began in October 2000. Meetings with members of the administration and the School’s faculty artists were held to assess the program in light of both traditional student development goals and the unique artistic experiences of each division at Juilliard. The faculty agreed that there were two goals operating concurrently in Colloquium: student development and interarts appreciation. Many also agreed that the class was not fully meeting either of these goals, nor bridging the connection between them.

The discussions explored essential questions such as: How do student development issues influence academic and artistic development? Are these issues different from those of students at more traditional liberal arts colleges? How prepared are faculty and administrators to address these issues? Several faculty members shared common concerns about student development but felt unqualified to address these issues. A few members expressed a keen interest in learning new skills that would enable them to help students in ways that would enhance student’s learning experience at Juilliard.

In April 2001, a new draft of the Colloquium syllabus was proposed to faculty facilitators and teaching artists. It addressed issues central to the first-time college students at Juilliard: communication and self-reliance skills, time management, values clarification, and advocacy for self and the arts. Through a combination of small group meetings and large group sessions, students would be given numerous opportunities to practice these skills in exercises with their peers. The final project would be a collaborative presentation that each group would perform for one another at the end of the semester.

In the small weekly groups, faculty facilitators led values clarification, communication, advocacy, and other exercises to help initiate discussions among their students. “I believe the small group sessions had an enormous impact on how the students will communicate about their work and the work of other artists for the rest of their lives,” wrote Kate Wilson, a drama faculty member who taught Colloquium for the first time this fall. “They began the semester by addressing their comments only to me, the ‘teacher,’ and by the last session, they freely, without any urging, spoke to each other and asked others what they thought about provocative subjects. That curiosity and generosity makes a lifetime artist! The doors are open. They opened them.”

Colloquium’s final goal for the semester was achieved when, on December 12, in three large rooms, students performed their projects for their peers. The range of performances—each no longer than seven minutes—was vast and entertaining. One group performed an original musical composition with dance. Another gave a spoken word, music, dance, and visual art interpretation of the nursery rhyme “Humpty Dumpty.” As one student wrote on an anonymous evaluation: “I have gotten a lot of positive things out of this class. I was floored by the drama and jazz performances, but even more impressed by the thrown together Colloquium performances. I couldn’t believe how powerfully the different performance arts came together in the end.”

Unlike the typical Juilliard performance, these projects were not finely tuned. Instead, at the heart of the presentations was the process of establishing content, negotiating roles, working with peers of different disciplines, communicating ideas, responding to global issues, and advocating for the self and the arts.

“As I prepared for our final Colloquium small group session, I realized how we had grown from timid strangers to supportive colleagues,” said Alice K. Dade, a fourth-year flute student who served as a peer mentor. Colloquium was a success, and discussions are already underway for next year’s Colloquium and how to further enhance the class and integrate it with the Faculty Mentoring Program that is currently being developed. 

In reflecting on this year’s Colloquium, Jo Sarzoti of the liberal arts faculty remarked, “Colloquium allows an environment in which I can get to know the students as people; it’s a fundamentally more human situation than a class. I think the students realize this too, and so the whole school environment is, by extension of their relation with the Colloquium leader, humanized. Which has to be good, especially here.”