Sarah Lawrence College Art of Teaching Program

Sarah Lawrence College is a private liberal arts college in Yonkers, New York. The college models its approach to education after the Oxford/Cambridge system of one-on-one student-faculty tutorials. Sarah Lawrence scholarship, particularly in the humanities, performing arts, and writing, places high value on independent study. Originally a women's college, Sarah Lawrence became coeducational in 1968.

History

Sarah Lawrence College was established by the real-estate mogul William Van Duzer Lawrence on the grounds of his estate in Westchester County and was named in honor of his wife, Sarah Bates Lawrence. The college was originally intended to provide instruction in the arts and humanities for women. A major component of the college's early curriculum was "productive leisure", wherein students were required to work for eight hours weekly in such fields as modeling, shorthand, typewriting, applying makeup, and gardening. Its pedagogy, modeled on the tutorial system of Oxford University, combined independent research projects, individually supervised by the teaching faculty, and seminars with low student-to-faculty ratio, a pattern that it retains to the present, despite its cost. Sarah Lawrence was the first liberal arts college in the United States to incorporate a rigorous approach to the arts with the principles of progressive education, focusing on the primacy of teaching and the concentration of curricular efforts on individual needs.

Harold Taylor, President of Sarah Lawrence College from 1945 to 1959, greatly influenced the college. Taylor was elected president at age 30, maintained a friendship with the educational philosopher John Dewey, and worked to employ the Dewey method at Sarah Lawrence. Taylor spent much of his career calling for educational reform in the United States, using the success of Sarah Lawrence as an example of the possibilities of a personalized, modern, and rigorous approach to higher education.

Sarah Lawrence became a coeducational institution in 1968. Prior to this transition, there were discussions about relocating the school and merging it with Princeton University, but the administration opted to remain independent.

College presidents

The first president of the college was Marion Coats from 1924 to 1929. She was a friend of Vassar College president Henry MacCracken and William Van Duzer Lawrence. Coats had traditional views of women's role in society that were at odds with her progressive approach to women's education. Cristle Collins Judd was introduced as president in 2017.

Academics

At the undergraduate level, Sarah Lawrence offers an alternative to traditional majors. Students pursue a wide variety of courses in four different curricular distributions: the Creative Arts (writing, music, dance, theatre, film, and the plastic arts, such as painting, printmaking, drawing and sculpture); history and the social sciences (e.g., anthropology, economics, political science, and sociology); the humanities (e.g., Asian studies, art history, film studies, languages, literature, philosophy, and religion); and natural science and mathematics (biology, chemistry, physics, computer science, and mathematics). Classes are structured around a seminar-conference system through which students learn in small, highly interactive seminars and private tutorials with professors. Each student is assigned to a faculty advisor, known as a "don", who helps the student plan a course of study and provides ongoing academic guidance. Most courses, apart from those in the performing arts, consist of two parts: the seminar, limited to 15 students, and conferences, which is a meeting with a seminar professor. In these conferences, students develop individual projects that extend the course material and link it to their personal interests. Sarah Lawrence has no required courses, and traditional examinations have largely been supplanted by research papers. Additionally, grades are recorded only for transcript purposes—narrative evaluations are given in lieu of grades. The college sponsors international programs in Florence, at Wadham College, Oxford, at Reid Hall in Paris, and at the British American Drama Academy in London. Sarah Lawrence also has the longest-running study abroad program in Havana, Cuba.

Sarah Lawrence also offers Master's-level programs in Writing, the Art of Teaching, Child Development, Theatre, Dance, and Dance/Movement Therapy and is home to the nation's oldest graduate program in Women's History and the nation's first master's degree programs in Human Genetics and Health Advocacy.

Sarah Lawrence offers a program for people wishing to seek a BA. or a Master's and have been out of school for any period.

Exchange programs

* Spelman College Exchange Program: Beginning in spring 2007, female SLC students began participating in an exchange program with Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia.
* Pitzer College Exchange Program
* Kansai Gaidai University (Asian Studies Program) Osaka, Japan
* Tsuda University (Private Women's University) Tokyo, Japan

International programs

The college has a number of international programs in four countries. Sarah Lawrence makes all practical efforts to preserve its most characteristic elements, such as one-on-one interaction with professors, small classes, and an emphasis on qualitative comprehension, in its programs overseas.
* Havana: In place since 2000, this program is the longest-running in Cuba by an American university. The course offerings at the University of Havana include Afro-Cuban culture, art history, Cuban or Latin American cinema, Cuban history, Latin American studies, literature, psychology, urban and rural sociology, U.S.-Cuban relations, and women's studies. All courses are taught by Cuban faculty and are attended by Cuban students. Each student is also required to enroll in an advanced Spanish course. The most distinctive feature is an affiliation with Centro de Estudios Demográficos (CEDEM), one of the research centers at the University of Havana. At CEDEM students meet with experts whose research and professional expertise focus on developments in contemporary Cuban society. Students select a research topic and are paired with a professor from CEDEM with whom they meet on a regular basis, much like the regular conference structure.
* London: Jointly sponsored by the British American Drama Academy and Sarah Lawrence College, the program expands Sarah Lawrence's long-standing and vibrant tradition in the performing arts by exposing students to the rigors of professional British training in acting. The faculty includes some of Britain's most distinguished actors and directors. The heart of each student's program is scene study in classical and modern works. Students also take courses in voice, movement, and stage fighting and participate in fully staged performances at the end of each term.
* Oxford: Since 1985, Sarah Lawrence College has been associated with Wadham College, one of the undergraduate colleges of Oxford University in England. This program is open to select juniors and seniors. Students are best prepared to undertake the demands of Oxford if their coursework in their first and sophomore years have included significant analytical and written work.
* Leeds: Students who are admitted into the University of Leeds program have access to a variety of disciplines and academic strengths. The academic year runs from September through the end of May and is made up of two semesters. Students will take a combination of lectures, seminars, and tutorials, with additional time for private study, labs (sciences) and fieldwork. Students will meet with a Sarah Lawrence program advisor in determining their course of study each semester.
* Paris: Centered at historic Reid Hall in the Montparnasse quarter of Paris, the program is Sarah Lawrence's oldest and focuses on the humanities and creative arts. The program is conducted entirely in French and includes one required French-language class and three other courses of the student's choosing. Classes may be taken at the University of Paris, Institut d'Etudes Politiques, the Ecole du Louvre, and the Institut Catholique, or other, more specialized institutions.

Graduate programs

Sarah Lawrence offers nine graduate programs, each of which confers the Master of Arts, Master of Fine Arts, or Master of Science degree upon its graduates. In contrast to highly specialized, research-oriented PhD doctoral study, these programs reflect the emphasis on interdisciplinary studies and the close student-teacher relationship that have come to be characteristic of the college's undergraduate program. Intensive work with faculty members, small seminars, and one-on-one conferences form the foundation of the curricular model. According to their own literature, the programs make an effort to balance the "theoretical (usually discussed in seminars and conferences) with the practical (in the form of fieldwork, practicums, research or creative work). This experiential work is most often conducted not in isolation, but in the midst of a community. Interdisciplinary work and ideas are encouraged, as is an ethic of social responsibility." There are approximately 298 graduate students at Sarah Lawrence.

Art of Teaching

The Sarah Lawrence College Art of Teaching Program offers training in education in both degree-track and continuing education formats. One component of the program is the Empowering Teachers Program, which was established in 1989 as a forum for the support of teachers and educational administrators, and has since expanded into a resource and network for more than 250 beginning and experienced professionals from 25 school districts in Westchester County and adjacent areas of New York, Connecticut and New Jersey.

Rankings

In 2007, criticism of rankings of U.S. colleges and universities, particularly their perceived impact on the college admissions process, gained national prominence due in part to the March 11, 2007, '' Washington Post'' article "The Cost of Bucking College Rankings" by Michele Tolela Myers, a former president of Sarah Lawrence College. As Sarah Lawrence College dropped its SAT test score submission requirement for its undergraduate applicants in 2003, thus joining the SAT optional movement for undergraduate admission, SLC does not have SAT data to send to ''U.S. News'' for its national survey. Of this decision, Myers states, "We are a writing-intensive school, and the information produced by SAT scores added little to our ability to predict how a student would do at our college; it did, however, do much to bias admission in favor of those who could afford expensive coaching sessions." At the time, Sarah Lawrence was the only American college that completely disregarded SAT scores in its admission process. As a result of this policy, in the same ''The Washington Post'' article, Dr. Myers stated that she was informed by the '' U.S. News & World Report'' that if no SAT scores were submitted, ''U.S. News'' would "make up a number" to use in its magazines. She further argues that if SLC were to decide to stop sending all data to ''U.S. News & World Report'', their ranking would be artificially decreased. Sarah Lawrence College now maintains a test-optional policy, with typically over half of applicants submitting their scores.

On June 19, 2007, following a meeting of the Annapolis Group, which represents over 100 liberal arts colleges, Sarah Lawrence announced that it would join others who had previously signed the letter to college presidents asking them not to participate in the "reputation survey" section of the ''U.S. News & World Report'' survey (this section comprises 25% of the ranking). Despite this public stance opposing these rankings, the 2019 edition ranked Sarah Lawrence tied for the 65th best liberal arts college in the nation.

In 2018, '' Forbes'' rated it 133rd overall in its America's Top Colleges ranking, which includes 660 military academies, national universities, and liberal arts colleges. That same year, '' Washington Monthly'' rankings ranked Sarah Lawrence 144th in the liberal arts college category.

Political involvement and activism

Political activism has played a crucial role in forming the spirit of the Sarah Lawrence community since the early years of the college. As early as 1938, students were volunteering in working-class sections of Yonkers, New York to help bring equality and educational opportunities to poor

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