Pamela D. Jennings has been appointed to the newly created position of vice president for student affairs at California College of the Arts (CCA). She will oversee the activities of the Student Affairs division, which encompasses career services, residential life, judicial affairs, counseling, learning resources, advising, disability resources, international student affairs, student activities, student government, student exhibitions, food service, and transportation.

Provost Stephen Beal commented on the appointment: "Recognizing the growth of our student body in the last few years and with the goal of creating the best possible student experience, the college created this new cabinet-level position to provide vision and strategic leadership in the Student Affairs division. We are very fortunate to have Pamela in this pivotal role. Her proven leadership and extensive experience working with students in a variety of capacities will be a tremendous asset to the college."

"I am delighted to join the CCA community," stated Jennings. "My career has been dedicated to empowering and preparing students. CCA is a wonderfully creative and stimulating learning environment. I look forward to working with students, faculty, staff, and alumni to ensure a comprehensive community of support to meet the needs of our students."

Jennings comes to CCA from the University of California at Berkeley, where she has been director of admissions, student affairs, and alumni affairs for the Graduate School of Journalism since 2005. Prior to this she was the director of outreach, retention, and diversity affairs for UC Berkeley's graduate division, a position she held for 10 years. She has an MFA in film and television from the University of California at Los Angeles and a BA in mass communications from UC Berkeley. Her teaching experience includes lecturer positions at Saint Mary's College of California and UC Berkeley.

In June of last year, while Bay Area grade-school students were just settling into the bliss of summer vacation, more than one hundred of their teachers were in classrooms at California College of the Arts. For three days—unusually balmy ones for San Francisco—they listened carefully to instructions; shared paste, colored pencils, and construction paper; and worked thoughtfully together to complete assignments.

In one of their many workshops, the teachers were asked to consider circles—the numerous ways they exist in nature, for instance, and how humans have used them for centuries to solve problems. From seats on the floor, they offered up examples round-robin style. Once they had exhausted simple ones such as the wheel, doughnut, and compact disc, they had to delve deeper and think harder about the world around them. The red blood cell, ball bearing, and Hubble telescope lens kept the last few players in the game. Afterward, the group created artworks based on circles.

In another workshop, the teachers looked at slides of propaganda art. They compared Nazi recruitment posters with United States army posters from World War II to understand how composition, color, and other visual components made their respective messages effective. Then they took on the challenge of communicating messages to one another—at first using only words, then only images.

These activities were all part of the VALUES Project Summer Teaching Institute, organized by CCA's Center for Art and Public Life. Its purpose was to help teachers better understand how to teach art as a subject and how to successfully integrate it into general subject courses.

In fall 2007, due to a growing need for this kind of specialized instruction, CCA will begin offering an expanded version of the program, the Art in Education Teaching Institute. A comprehensive, year-round development program, the AIE Teaching Institute will be open to K–12 generalist teachers as well as teaching artists. It will feature classes that accommodate a variety of schedules as well as an Arts Learning Specialist Certification option for Alameda County teachers and teaching artists.

Those outside the art and education communities might not perceive the difference between teaching artist and art teacher. But there is a difference. Art teachers, like their colleagues in more traditional subjects, receive training through a teacher credentialing program. Teaching artists, however, are professionally trained artists who receive full or partial funding from third-party organizations to teach art in K–12 schools. They often present a solution for schools in which budget constraints, as well as administrative pressure to prioritize resources for traditional subjects, have resulted in a lack of adequate art programming.

According to Ann Wettrich, associate director of arts education for the Center for Art and Public Life, teaching artists are playing an even more crucial role today. Although there are schools who have managed to keep full-time art teacher positions in their budgets, there is currently a shortage of credentialed art teachers nationwide, so teaching artists are able to fill this gap as well. And now, with the recent decision by the California governor and state legislature to allocate $105 million in new annual funding to restore arts education to California's public schools, there is going to be even more demand for qualified individuals.

"The Art in Education Teaching Institute will give teaching artists the insight, understanding, and skills they need to collaborate successfully with schools, providing engaging art and art-integrated lessons that promote learning across all areas of the curriculum," says Wettrich.

For teachers of traditional subjects, the program will help them develop a deeper understanding of the kind of learning that takes place in the context of art education. Integrating these processes into math or science coursework, for instance, can help students (especially in schools without other kinds of art programming) develop skill sets that they might not otherwise. It can also affect how students learn traditional subjects. Consider, for instance, the exercise on circles as part of an introduction to high-school geometry. For some students, learning to connect math to the world at large in such a conceptual and tactile way is exactly what is needed to awaken their interest in the subject.

Jennifer Stuart, program manager for arts education at the Center for Art and Public Life, says, "The Art in Education Teaching Institute will give teaching artists and K–12 educators the tools they need to deliver an outstanding curriculum, but the overall goal is to foster an understanding of how ideas originating in contemporary art and progressive education can be used to create dynamic and effective learning experiences for all students."

The Art in Education Teaching Institute was developed by the Center for Art and Public Life in collaboration with the Alameda County Office of Education. For more information about the courses or to register for classes, see AIE Teaching Institute.

Two students of the MFA Program in Writing—Adam Nemett, who just finished his first year, and alumna Kate Colby (2003)—have received prestigious recognition by the literary community.

California College of the Arts (CCA) will confer honorary doctorate degrees on the artists Robert Bechtle and Trinh T. Minh-ha at the centennial commencement exercises to be held Saturday, May 12, at 2 p.m. at the Masonic Auditorium in San Francisco. CCA President Michael S. Roth will deliver the commencement address. In addition to attending the commencement ceremonies, Bechtle and Minh-ha will be honored at a reception at the Oliver Art Center on CCA's Oakland campus the previous evening, and they will participate in the post-commencement reception on the college's San Francisco campus.

Robert Bechtle was born in 1932 in San Francisco and grew up across the bay in Alameda. He studied graphic design and painting at CCA (then called California College of Arts and Crafts), earning a bachelor's degree in 1954 and an MFA in 1958. He began painting seriously in the early 1960s and found his own voice through a tightly controlled, photorealistic mode that was distinct from the expressionistic paint handling of Bay Area Figurative art—then the dominant style among his local peers and predecessors, including Richard Diebenkorn, one of his teachers at CCA.

Bechtle's work has been exhibited since the late 1950s and has been included in important surveys of American art in the United States and abroad. His solo exhibitions have included an early career retrospective in 1973 at the Crocker Museum in Sacramento and a critically acclaimed 2005 retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which traveled to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

His paintings and drawings reside in numerous private and public collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Bechtle's many awards and honors include grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a 1995 induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2006 he was invited to join the board of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as the institution's first artist trustee.

Trinh T. Minh-ha was born in Vietnam and is a filmmaker, writer, and music composer. She has made seven films, which have been included in festivals throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia: Night Passage (2004), The Fourth Dimension (2001), A Tale of Love (1995), Shoot for the Contents (1991), Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989), Naked Spaces—Living Is Round (1985), and Reassemblage (1982).

She has created three large-scale multimedia installations: L'autre marche (The Other Walk, 2006, Musée du Quai Branly, Paris); The Desert Is Watching (2003, in collaboration with Jean-Paul Bourdier, Kyoto Biennale, Japan); and Nothing But Ways (1999, in collaboration with CCA faculty member Lynn Marie Kirby, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco). She is also the author of nine books.

Minh-ha has received numerous awards, including the Trailblazers Award at MIPDOC, Cannes, and the American Film Institute's National Independent Filmmaker Maya Deren Award. Shoot for the Contents won the award for best cinematography at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival and the award for best feature documentary at the Athens International Film Festival, and it toured internationally with the 1993 biennial of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Surname Viet Given Name Nam received the Merit Award at the Bombay International Film Festival and the Blue Ribbon Award at the American Film and Video Festival. Naked Spaces—Living Is Round received the award for best experimental feature at the American International Film Festival and the award for best feature documentary at the Athens International Film Festival in 1986; it toured nationally and internationally with the 1987 biennial of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Minh-ha has taught at the National Conservatory of Music, Dakar, Senegal; Cornell University, Ithaca, New York; San Francisco State University; and Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. She is currently a professor in the departments of rhetoric and gender and women's studies at UC Berkeley.

About CCA

Founded in 1907, California College of the Arts is the largest regionally accredited, independent school of art and design in the western United States. Noted for the interdisciplinary nature and breadth of its programs, CCA offers studies in 19 undergraduate and six graduate majors in the areas of fine arts, architecture, design, and writing. The college offers bachelor of architecture, bachelor of arts, bachelor of fine arts, master of architecture, master of arts, and master of fine arts degrees.

With campuses in Oakland and San Francisco, CCA currently enrolls 1,600 full-time students. Noted alumni include the painters Nathan Oliveira and Raymond Saunders; the ceramicists Robert Arneson, Viola Frey, and Peter Voulkos; the filmmaker Wayne Wang; the conceptual artists David Ireland and Dennis Oppenheim; and the designers Lucille Tenazas and Michael Vanderbyl.

The college will confer degrees on 415 students at the 2007 commencement exercises. For more information about CCA's honorary doctorate degrees or the centennial commencement, please call 510.594.3666.