What’s Your Learning Style?

In a recent group meeting, the RISD Writing Center tutors answered the VARK questionnaire. VARK stands for the four different modes of learning: visual, aural, read/write, and kinesthetic. These styles affect not only how we learn but how we think, make, do, listen, speak, read, and write.

Some of us were surprised by the results—one person discovered that she is primarily kinesthetic, for example, when she thought she was firmly in the read and write camp. These surprises challenged our assumptions about others’ learning styles as well. We used our new awareness to think about tutoring methods that might best serve various learning styles, and about how these preferences come into play in the studio.

Here’s the questionnaire if you’re interested in taking it yourself. And next time you come to the Writing Center, feel free to share your style!

The Best Half-Day Ever

On October 16, 2015, from 1-5, the RISD Writing Center’s dream symposium will be happening right here at RISD. If you’re interested in writing as an artist or designer or writing by artists and designers, you won’t want to miss it. Click on the poster below for all the details.

Bravo!

Pomp and circumstance with hi-jinx, hilarity, and a touch of anarchy — RISD Commencement is always a headline-worthy affair. But this year was extra exciting for us, because Malcolm Rio, Graduate Student Speaker, and Rachel Ossip, Senior Class Speaker, both happen to be RISD Writing Center tutors.

Malcolm stood tall in his studded heels, checked his snapchat, and argued for the value of learning to “fail well” in a world of contingent crises. Rachel compared the RISD we know today to the drinking fountain we could have been in a poetic meditation on origins, water, and what stays with us. Of course John Waters was insanely amazing, but these guys were just as brilliant, just out of the gates of RISD.

Check out their speeches at right, and visit the RISD Commencement 2015 website for more.

http://commencement.risd.edu/speakers

http://commencement.risd.edu/speakers

“You are a Ffabschrifter”

Students of Lucinda Hitchcock and Rachel Ossip’s Shaping Language course spent the semester “ffabschrifting” — treating writing as making and making as writing and simultaneously creating content and form, each with the other in mind. The class hosted a final event/party downtown in the Design Office last night.

Each student read their own poem/story/definition of “ffabschrifting,” and Hitchcock and Ossip read a transcript — no, a ffabschrift — of their own previous conversation about the course’s development and all the brilliant, unexpected ways students took on the role of ffabschrifter. This variety sparked some engaging debate: on the one hand, it seems like we are all ffabschrifters, whether we know it or acknowledge it or embrace it or not; at the same time, purposeful and conscious attention made all the difference to everyone’s process and resulting work.

The group then invited visitors into the discussion with some questions: Does ffabschrifting have to involve text? Is it limited to just writing and making? Is “ffabschrifting” the right word for what’s happening here? Amid all these loose ends, one thing was certain: ffabschrifting is more than a practice — it’s a movement. We love these ideas and these questions, and can’t wait to see how the movement advances.

Check out some of the class’s work on their website: http://shapinglanguage.tumblr.com/

The Shaping Language course will be offered to GD seniors and grad students again next year (and non-majors with permission from the instructor).

Triple Canopy’s Publication Intensive

Interested in publication as an art form, an evolving medium, and a site for experimentation? This summer program is a great opportunity to learn about the history of publication and actively engage in the contemporary practice. According to their announcement, participants will “research, analyze, and enact an approach to publication that hinges on today’s networked forms of production and circulation but also mines the history of print culture and artistic practice.”

Check out the details and apply by Monday, April 6.