Instead of reading a book about the history of the American quilt, some freshmen stitched their own last fall. And instead of listening to a lecture about the cultural significance of composer Leonard Bernstein, another group of freshmen danced to excerpts from his masterpiece “West Side Story.”

These are just two examples of the twelve freshman seminars available this academic year that include an art-making component.

Using extra funding provided by University President Drew G. Faust last year, the Freshman Seminar Program created a new set of seminars that combine traditional academic learning with a more artistic, hands-on approach.

Roughly ten percent of students currently enrolled in the Freshman Seminar Program have opted for seminars that include some form of art-making, according to program director Sandra F. Naddaff ’75.

The excitement surrounding the new course offerings has not been limited only to students, but has extended to faculty as well, according to Naddaff.

“It was very exciting to see the creativity with which the faculty responded to this opportunity,” she said.

This year, for example, History Professor Laurel Ulrich—renowned for coining the phrase “Well-behaved women seldom make history”—inserted a quilt-making unit into her material history seminar on the significance of the American quilt.

“One of the ways to understand an artifact is to try to understand how it was made, and one of the ways to understand how it was made is to try some of the steps,” Ulrich said. “I was surprised how much people learned by trying to do it.”

BEYOND ACADEMIA

From the perspective of Expository Writing Preceptor Zachary C. Sifuentes ’97-’99, the freshman seminars that include an art-making component encourage students to look beyond traditional methods of learning and to directly interact with the art itself.

“Around here, I’ve seen that we often try to solve problems just with our heads and not our hands,” Sifuentes said. “Doing and reflecting and re-doing makes it happen a lot faster.”

By offering students the opportunity to play with letter types on the page, Sifuentes’ seminar—“Pressing the Page: Making Art with Letters, Paper, and Ink”—allows freshmen to consider language as a physical process and artform.

Sifuentes added that the manual creation of prints has a mystical quality, particularly in an era of computer printers. The print-making process “physically” inserts the creator and generates “much more immediate interaction,” he said.

“What we’re doing is...physically manifesting the process that a lot of scholarship engages in, the thinking on paper,” Sifuentes said.

The hands-on approach of seminars like Sifuentes’ offers a unique experience for freshmen, who may later grow jaded by the standard classroom methodologies at Harvard, he said.