Date: Tuesday June 17 at 9am PDT
Guest Speaker: Keith Sawyer, Morgan Distinguished Professor in Educational Innovations at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Summary paragraph:
Professor Keith Sawyer will talk about his new book from MIT Press, Learning to See. This is an account of how professional artists and designers create and how they teach others to do it. Since the 1990s, Sawyer has used sociocultural theory in his empirical studies to analyze both individual and group cognitive and social processes. He has previously studied the sociocultural dynamics of children’s social pretend play and Chicago improv theater. For this new book, he spent over ten years interviewing a hundred professors who’ve taught in 50 different colleges, universities, and institutes. He also interviewed students to learn about the personal transformation they go through as they learn to see and think like successful creative professionals. Learning to See tells the stories of the professional artists and designers who teach in BFA and MFA programs throughout the U.S., including top schools in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. In the best BFA and MFA programs, students learn to see things they couldn’t see before, and they learn to think in new ways. Becoming an artist or designer is not about learning to draw or sew or weld—it is about learning to see.
Zoom Link: https://zoom.us/j/98564124237
Meeting ID: 985 6412 4237
Passcode: Vygotsky
Readings:
Sawyer, K. (2025). Learning to See: Inside the World’s Leading Art and Design Schools. MIT Press.