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FALL/WINT ER 2020 WEBB M AGA ZINE
T HE WEBB SCHOOL S webb.org
The Final Word
By Theresa Smith, Ph.D.
Unbounded Thinking
I recently had the opportunity to visit the Guggenheim Museum in New York. There were two parts of the experience that amazed me. The first was the building itself. Slowly walking up the circular ramp that is at the heart of Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural masterpiece was unexpectedly breathtaking. The other was an exhibit of works not normally on display, playfully entitled “Artistic License.” Museum administrators had commissioned six visual artists – great artists like Paul Chan and Jenny Holzer— to comb through the museum’s warehouses. The artists were charged with selecting works from the collection and arranging them in mini-expositions. This exhibit intrigued me, at first glance, perhaps because the idea of diving into the stored collection of a world-class museum like the Guggenheim sounds fantastic. And that sense of discovery and wonder was captured in all six resulting exhibits. The shows that these artists curated were surprising, unconventional, new. Each artist approached the task from a fresh perspective, intentionally striving to break free of conventions and to create displays that challenged old art historical narratives and imagined new ones.
This is what our academic program at Webb hopes to accomplish for our students. We strive to expand the way students think about the world around them and challenges them to think deeply about their place in it. We want them to question old ways of thinking and propose new frameworks for inquiry and living. We want them to have confidence in their perspective, their ideas, their potential. All this and more is what we mean by cultivating unbounded thinkers. It is an amorphous concept, difficult to define, and yet at the heart of all we do. I know there are at least three ways Webb cultivates unbounded thinkers. The first is in the classroom. Our educational philosophy embraces rigor, depth of knowledge, real subject mastery, and our classes are designed to move students toward that goal. Webb teachers know that students do not gain real mastery of a topic through rote learning, by memorizing facts or regurgitating the ideas of others. Students learn through their experiences. Why memorize mathematical formulas
when you can learn to derive them? Why study force as a theoretical concept when you can ride a roller coaster, measure and calculate the forces at work, and design and build your own? Why study ancient law codes as part of history when you can analyze and debate their relevance in contemporary communities, including ours at Webb? I know the power of experience firsthand from my own teaching. Touring the archive of the Wende Museum of The Cold War, which houses the largest collection of East Berlin memorabilia in North America, illustrated for students in my Advanced Studies class on The Cold War Era the complexity of historical writing and what is at stake in the way we tell the story of the past. As we walked through aisles of Lenin busts and communist-era clothing, my students witnessed the array of historical artifacts scholars study and were reminded that history is lived experience. Sitting at dawn under James Turrell’s architectural installation
