Art, incorporated

The genetic-counseling program at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., requires students to prepare to give patients troubling news about the results of medical tests. So it has partnered with the theater department to do role-playing exercises.

"The theater students have been fabulous" at portraying patients, says Caroline Lieber, director of the counseling program, "so realistic and so on-target."

Actors often stay after the role-playing session to explain to student-counselors how their characters perceived the conversation.

"It's a perfect way to use the arts in a constructive context," says Scott Ritter, one of the actors and an aspiring playwright. "I often choose to go in there as a kind of rough, abusive guy, and it's shocking to them sometimes."

When the parents of a student at Susquehanna University donated a collection of 1,616 French advertising posters, the school first did the obvious: It catalogued the collection and began to develop exhibitions.

But French language professors Lynn Palermo and Scott Manning saw some less conventional possibilities. Working with Valerie Livingston, head of the art department at the Selinsgrove, Pa., campus, they developed a range of courses and projects that draw on the posters.

"The posters are very valuable for us because the use of authentic French materials is extremely important in language teaching," says Professor Manning. The posters date from 1890 to 1980 and advertise circuses, concerts, trade shows, clothing, household appliances, food, the national lottery, alcohol, antialcoholism campaigns, and many other products and events.

"They can just lead you in so many directions," says Professor Palermo. "Posters as art, posters as advertising, posters as cultural commentary." And they're filled with cultural references and puns that can make for challenging translation assignments.

In a business French course last spring, students chose posters as the basis of their final projects. One pair researched the anti-alcoholism campaign. Another selected an ad for yogurt and ended up researching Dannon, a multinational corporation. Another student chose a poster showing an obscure circus from Lyon; it proved to be a daunting research task.

Palermo says she wanted students to do unconventional digging, "to learn that research is a work in progress and that they wouldn't have a nice, neat little paper at the end of the semester." The students did write papers in French, but they also produced Powerpoint presentations.

The professors are keeping the research so that future students can build on it. "We hope to compile this information and give it to the gallery so that we'll be providing a service to the university," Palermo says.

The posters have been used in a number of other ways, too. In conversational French class, students chose a poster and developed a skit or commercial based on it. Manning has used the posters as the basis for writing assignments in French grammar and composition classes. Eventually, the two teachers hope to have their students curate their own gallery show of some of the posters, choosing a theme, then researching and presenting it.

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