Report from the Associate Director
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The completion of the Michael S. Currier Center in April and the implicit rededication of The Putney School to the cultivation of the imagination and creativity through the arts remain the major force in shaping the character of the academic year '03-'04. What this signature building provides is ample room for musicians in our growing music program to practice, learn and perform; a studio for our dancers that has resulted in our ability to offer dance as a year-long academic elective next year, in addition to the evening and afternoon options; and an art gallery that housed an alumni art show for the opening of the Currier Center that included over 70 alumni artists, many of whom have achieved international recognition. The alumni art show generated great excitement and served as an inspiration to Putney's current visual art students. In June, the musical Cabaret was wonderfully performed, modeling a collaboration between drama and dance facilitated by the new dance studio.
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 Judith Sheridan |
The Michael S. Currier Center is and will increasingly be a resource to our students and faculty, and to the community as well. In its first brief season, the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra and Brattleboro Youth Orchestra performed. The audience consisted of community people as well as Putney School members. In May, two Tibetan Monks created a sand mandala in the Michael S. Currier meditation room. The process took ten days. During their residency, the monks, led by the Venerable Yignyen Tenzin, conducted an overflow crowd of students, faculty, staff and townspeople in meditation followed by teachings. One faculty member characterized the monks' message as "lessons in how to be human beings." A crowd of students from local schools and townspeople attended the dismantling ceremony that culminated in the highly ritualized disbursing of the sand in Putney School's Puddle. The Currier Center has reinvigorated efforts to bring diverse cultural offerings to campus, enrich our students' education as well as provide a bridge between the school and the town.
The focus during this academic year has been on planning to better integrate new technologies with the progressive pedagogical mission of The Putney School. This will result in a new Instructional Technology Center housed in the library building next to our Library. This center, with new hardware and updated software, will support student work from word processing to multi-media presentations, as well as student research. Jane Baker, Director of Technology, and Reuben Caron, a new colleague who will serve as Network Operation Manager, will work to ensure that our infrastructure will be reliable and lay the groundwork for a wireless local area network. In keeping with efforts to integrate technology with Putney's progressive pedagogy, eight faculty members, Brian Cohen, Cathy Abbott, Erik Wilkins-McKee, Marie Clark-Derouault, Sydney Snyder, Kathryn Tolbert, Abijah Reed and Joe Holland, participated in a laptop workshop early in the summer and have developed web pages and assignments to support interactive, exploratory student learning in their classes.
In the spring, Brian Morgan and I attended the National Conference of the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) that took place in Montreal. We both attended a panel discussion focusing on education in the 21st Century. What became very apparent to us is that the ideals of The Putney School from its founding years in the 1930s still serve as a blueprint for education in the future. The panel of distinguished educators that included the President of NAIS, Pat Bassett, spoke about the need for education for environmental sustainability and the desirability of a curriculum that teaches students how to learn, that is interdisciplinary, and that is rooted in real-life problems. An education that encourages active citizenship and a global perspective was promoted, as was an education that values the imagination and creative problem solving. I found this panel energizing and reassuring with the realization that Putney School principles remain in the forefront of educational thinking.
In keeping with the spirit of this realization, the academic year ended with new initiatives to be accomplished this coming academic year. We will be integrating the arts with traditional academics by offering a course called Observational Science that combines field science with scientific drawing. We will be integrating Geographical Information System (GIS) Mapping with the study of ecology and with facilities planning. In fact, the work that Hans Estrin and Randy Smith will be doing in this area has been accepted for a presentation that I will moderate at the next NAIS national meeting in February, 2005, in San Diego. We will also be working to expand our international exchange and travel program for our students, thanks to a three-year funding commitment from new Trustee Sandy Rower '81. Once again, The Putney School is regaining its proper place in the national and international conversation about teaching and learning.
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