If Cece Rooney ‘20 was to designate a theme for the second half of her senior year, it would be “prepare to pivot.”
When she left campus before Spring Break, bound for home in Dover, New Hampshire, she wasn’t sure when she’d see her townhouse again, when she’d next convene in the Student Center for a Thelmo meeting, or trek across campus to ceramics class. But she was prepared to address at least one of these unknowns with a 25-pound contingency plan—a fresh block of clay, courtesy of her Visiting Assistant Professor of Ceramics and Drawing Rachael Jones, her Ceramics II professor.
“We weren’t sure exactly what we were going to do with it, but at least we’d have something to do,” says Cece. “It’s definitely been a thinking-outside-the-box situation.”
Of all the courses required to pivot to an online, remote learning model, studio arts seem to pose some of the biggest challenges—and some of the greatest opportunities to get creative.
“I really had to look at what the limitations would be for what each course was doing the moment we all learned that we wouldn’t be back, and then reconfigure ways around those limitations,” says Jones, who also teaches Ceramics I, II and III as well as Drawing I.