First Year Experience

What is the First Year Experience?

The First Year Experience at the University of Arizona School of Art offers an engaging variety of thematic workshop-structured art courses, designed as an experiential initiation into professional artistic practice, creative methodology, and studio work ethic.  With broad exposure being the guiding principle, the workshops immerse students in a stimulating environment.  Here they engage not only in the making of art but also in a critical dialog that explores how their art communicates what it communicates—as well as strategies to sharpen this connection between the art object and its meaning.  The faculty works closely with the students from the generation of the idea through the realization of the object.  Integrated projects and processes, rather than isolated design exercises, encourage personal investment.  The focus of the program is to foster inventive and resourceful students, who can express complicated ideas in a manner that is both technically and conceptually sophisticated.  While situated in this supportive community, students develop critical thinking and communication skills through engaging group critiques, individual critiques, and written components.  The First Year Experience challenges, inspires, and empowers students with the basic artistic sovereignty requisite to their pursuit of an art degree.

 

First Year Experience Thematic Workshop Modules

In the new program, eight-week modular workshop courses replace the standard 3 unit, sixteen-week studio courses. The course modules are Mapping, Space, Gaze, Experience, Surface, Amalgam, Propaganda and The Body.  Undergraduates choose six of the eight workshops to fulfill First Year Program requirements. The half-semester workshop courses break up the semester into smaller, more focused and digestible packages—helping feather the beginning art student into professional practice, while also promising more variety (of practice and instruction) than the standard sixteen-week studio course model. The sixteen-week semester will be divided evenly into two eight-week Phases, Phase 1 and Phase 2.

Course #

 

Workshop Title

 

Pre-Requisites

Units

Weeks

100A

MAPPING*

 

2

8

100B

SPACE*

 

2

8

100C

GAZE

 

2

8

100D

EXPERIENCE

 

2

8

100E

SURFACE*

 

2

8

100F

AMALGAM

 

2

8

100G

PROPAGANDA

 

2

8

100J

THE BODY

100A

2

8

 *Asterisk indicates requirement for all BFA & BA studio and AVCE majors

 

First Year Experience Requirements:

Beyond the three required themes, MAPPING, SPACE AND SURFACE (marked with an asterisk), students choose three additional workshops.  Six workshops (or 12 Units) fulfill First Year Experience requirements.

For a description of these courses, please review the General Catalog.


Who will take the First Year Experience classes:
BFA Studio majors
BA Studio majors
BFA Art and Visual Culture Education majors

 

First Year Experience Instructors