17: The Changing Landscape of Ceramic Education

0:00Welcome to NSEKA 360, a podcast that amplifies and uplifts the voices of the ceramic community. I'm Edith Garcia for the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts. Visit nseka.net to learn more about how membership cultivates a clay community and shapes content and opportunities for the field. Follow us on Instagram and Facebook for the latest information about NSEKA.

0:30Hey, this is PJ Anderson, and I'm the Programs Director for NSEKA. Today's episode of NSEKA 360 features a discussion on the changing landscape of ceramic education with Brian Krakas, Lisa Dugliani, and Ben Carter. They talk about the demographic shift and closures in higher education, cross-school education, and helping an arts organization survive after a core institution downsizes its ceramics program.

1:02This conversation was recorded in person at the 2024 NSEKA Coalescence Conference in Richmond, Virginia. Special thanks to the Brickyard Network for producing this episode and supporting podcasting in the ceramics community. If you enjoyed this podcast, please support NSEKA's programming by donating at www.nseka.net forward slash donate. Part of podcasting is making connections.

1:34So a lot of what I do is talk to people about their work and try to make connections between people in different places. So today's topic of ceramic education, we're going to be drawing from my co-panelist experience, but we're also going to be talking about online education, traditional craft school education, and then other types of education, apprenticeships, things like that. So to start off, I'm just going to have you introduce yourself so that people can get to know you. So if you can just say where you're from, that would be great.

2:06I am Lisa Giuliani. I am the owner of Lockhouse Studio in Morgantown, West Virginia. I'm an alumnist of WVU Ceramics, community activist, co-founder of the Morgantown Studio Tour, and a 20-24 acre member cohort for the Alliance for Creative Rural Economies. All right, I'm Brian Kakas. I live in Marquette, Michigan on the shores of Lake Superior. I run the ceramics program at Northern Michigan University. I'm also the president of the Michigan Ceramic Art Association, which is focused in making connections within the state and beyond.

2:36I see some hands up from Michigan back there. And then also I own a homestead with an 80-acre farm where my wife and I are working with a market farm and also civic duties and kind of community activism. As you can hear already, both of these folks do a lot of different things. You know, it's not just being an artist or a teacher. You own a bar and a venue. You own a farm. Like, there's a lot of different things. So we're going to be talking a lot about community today. But we wanted to start talking actually about demographics and shifts in kind of the overall population of the United States

3:13and how that actually has affected the education system as a whole. So one of the ways that education in the U.S. was funded was through the GI Bill. So you guys probably are familiar with this. But after World War II, there was a tremendous amount of money that was pumped into U.S. service members' educations. And a lot of the sort of famous ceramic stars of that generation, the post-World War II generation, were actually GI Bill participants. So they went to school for free after their service.

3:45People like Frances Sinska, who had been in the Navy, was teaching at Montana State. She went on to have two students, Peter Volkus and Rudy Audio. Both were benefited from that. And that's just three people in a small state of Montana that went on to have bigger careers in ceramics, all funded by federal education dollars. As World War II, that generation went on, all of those peoples got married, had children.

4:15And the next generation of education benefited from sort of, if you can think about it, when you have a really big generation like the baby boom, there's all these resources that go into that. But then the generation after that, there's less students and there's all this pressure. So I wanted to maybe pass it to you so you could talk about your experience seeing the fluctuations in students and how your university has dealt with that as the natural demographics have changed. I'd say demographics is what we're all up against.

4:47Whether we want to talk about the big R1 schools or the smaller state and community schools, we all know that we're engaging with numbers. And numbers are the issues for how many educators are out there. Hands up. A whole sea of them. Lovely. Our problems, none of our problems are unique to a one place. They are based on numbers and data. And we are seeing, whether it's the Democrats or the Republicans that are in charge, not trying to make this political, but we do see trends in terms of where arts are being cut and where they're being supported and growth is happening.

5:17But numbers are one of the big things. I guess kind of coming right out with some information for people. The thing that I've been running into the most from deans and people up above in middle management is the telling you you don't have big enough programs, you're not big enough to survive, and you're not outreaching enough or servicing others. The national average for a ceramics undergraduate program is eight students. And up in the shores of Superior, 18 hours away from here, we're lucky enough to have an average of 12 to 13 students that are ceramic majors,

5:48both BFA and BA, kind of as just the average. When you look at some other things across the board, some of the biggest schools out there are Cranbrook. They've got 15% of their School of Art and Design is ceramics. That's a large percentage. Coming up from that is Maine College of Art and Design. They're representing about 4.3% of the institution. Or I'm sorry, not of the institution, but of the School of Art and Design itself. KCAI, they're another 4.1%.

6:20So the Northern Michigan University, again, we're a small school, sub-6,000 students at this point. We're representing about 4% of the School of Art and Design itself. And then the bigger picture there is that the School of Art and Design is representing currently 5.8% of the university as a whole. When you look at some other places, such as University of Michigan, that's something that we've put R1 schools, we do research against R1 schools to show how we fit in that gambit and success or failures.

6:50So knowing that some of the larger schools that are dealing with endowments and they have money to do things, nothing against them, we celebrate that. But they're coming in at about 1.3% of the university. And we are holding down, again, a 5.8% of the university as a whole. So there are a lot of numbers out there that by doing the research and from talking to colleagues and following up and going to administrative conferences, you'll start to get more insight to how successful we are as ceramics

7:21as these small programs, the value of being a small program. And then furthermore is needing to make connections with what we do and what some of the benefits a ceramics major or a ceramics advocate kind of gets involved with. And some of those things are in the state of Michigan. Sarah Cambenzi was a ceramics major in my program and she was a state representative, just recently resigned from that. We have a board of trustees that was a photography student and also took ceramic classes.

7:53He was also a state representative. Then the senator of Michigan, Senator Mallory McMorrow, started out as ceramics and then industrial design at Notre Dame, went on to Mazda. And those connections and working with people seemingly outside of the arts, she's now the senator and she's leading incredible discussions across the board. And so we have to look at how ceramics is allowing communities and businesses to grow as people grow into themselves. Yeah. Something I would like to talk about with changing demographics

8:24is this cohort of people called the Peak Millennials, which is 9.5 million people. It's the biggest group of individuals in our country. So these kids were born between 1990 and 1991. They went to college in 2008. And what else did we have in 2008? We had the recession, right? So what you have is these grandchildren of the boomers and they are now, the labor market is bad,

8:54so they're sheltering in universities. And enrollment starts to shoot up. So you have this huge cohort of people that are looking for a place to be. So there's a lot of competition and universities start to grow. Administration starts to bloat. So we have tons of people, but the realities are that behind these kids, we have a demographic cliff. There just aren't the children being born. So we're going to have to make a shift. We're going to totally have to shift going forward

9:26on how we perceive the higher education. And if I say it drastically, because just in the state of Michigan, we're looking at five years from now, there is a projected 40% decline in students. That's an incredible number when you think about what that's going to mean for the staff to faculty to hopefully at least shrinking the bloated admin, which is part of the thing. The bloated administration is a big deal. Yeah. But yeah, there's just going to be less kids going to college

9:57and that's just the realities. They don't exist. They're not there. They don't exist. Right. Right. But. Well, one of the things I wanted to talk about is how we can advocate for the arts through these natural cycles of boom and bust. Sure. We talked about, I talked about the World War II boom and then there's the peak millennial boom. So schools expand, expand, expand, and then they naturally contract. Yeah. But some schools contract more if the administration is not as art friendly.

10:28Right. So can either of you talk about just advocate, in general advocating for the arts, not even just ceramics, but for the arts in general to your administration or to your community so that people in power understand that education is more than just we educate people and they go out and get a job and make X amount of money. Being proactive, being engaged. Yeah. That is the number one thing. And so when I'm out there, my professional career in terms of making work,

10:59I long for the minutes or the hours that I can kind of squirrel away to make something. But my work has become being an advocate for the arts, for the university, and for the community. So in that, it's almost there's an ego to the amount of titles that are underneath my name when I send an email from the university because I'm on the international committee. I've been on the faculty review committee. I've been in curriculum for over 10 years, scheduling for over 10 years. But being on things like executive committees and senates, don't be quiet, don't be passive,

11:30don't get complacent. You have to be out there. You have to be the squeaky wheel. We have a phenomenal facility in the middle of nowhere. It's a world-class facility because we had an administrator in the School of Art and Design that worked in his position for 44 years as the assistant dean. But he fought tooth and nail to the point where the admin hated him and loved the day that he retired. But he built a multi-million dollar facility through being proactive. And so I've kind of taken that under my wing which is that's my job. Not just to teach students

12:00and to give people a voice and to give them a chance to learn who they are but is to show the benefits of that to the administrators, to teach them, to be in front of them, to not stop talking. So it means that there are long days. It's not just 8 to 10 hours a day working with the students and teaching but it's adding another 4 to 6 hours a day with paperwork and doing the research and providing the numbers to show tangible data that is fact and then also showing the connections of where the students are filtering into the community.

12:30We have the majority of our town are art and design alumni that have expanded from their original major into something greater and broader. 23% of our downtown street is made up of art and design alumni in creative businesses pushing about 35% of the businesses in the city of Marquette are all alumni that are creative businesses ranging from tattoo parlors to jewelry shops to VR gaming rooms to ceramic businesses

13:02with mass production to one-offs, poetry readings, open mic nights, things, the whole diaspora of what arts can be and what it connects to. We're teaching people how to think. We're teaching people how to problem solve and how to find middle ground. That's life. So it's not always governed, a lot of it's governed by abstracts. But we're teaching people how to navigate the world and make a place that they want to live in and Marquette has become a bit of an epicenter in the upper peninsula

13:33where we are far distance away from here on the Lake Superior. But people don't stop showing up and when they come they often do not leave. And they find a niche in the community because they find like-minded, progressive individuals that are into things like clean air and local food, celebrating small businesses across the board where any night of the week if you go out into town at a restaurant or a bar or just an event, the majority of who's there are the business owners that are staying active, that are engaging with each other

14:03and creating a two-way street between the university and the community but not relying on the university to provide anything for us. They are making a change and they're providing opportunity. I feel like in Morgantown we're about 10 years behind you guys. So we've had a huge shift. We've lost a lot of students. We've lost a lot of faculty as you guys all are very aware of what's happening in Morgantown at WVU. So we have kind of started the pivot

14:34where we are focusing our energy on making Morgantown an arts and tourist destination because you have to. Like you have to rely on your community. If you want people to stay, you have to give them a reason to stay. And so you have to create opportunities for arts and artists. So that's why I say we're 10 years behind you guys because we have done this initiative with First Fridays getting business owners together, having different makers

15:05come together so that we can promote the arts through business.

15:11It's really beautiful to see what you guys are doing because we are just slowly behind that because at the end of the day like you, you, we are a university town but you cannot rely on the university to be the savior. Like you have to bootstrap it and be like, okay, well if we're going to stay here and we want people to stay here we need to give them a reason to stay. We need to make this an arts and tourist destination so when people come and they graduate they say, I would never leave. Why would I leave when we have this community here? When we have all of these amazing people

15:42doing these amazing things like why would I ever leave? And then we're trying to use this as an opportunity to get people to not only stay but also come. So we have the Motown studio tour and a bunch of different artists will come and we're just showing them our community and showing them how artists can get together and work together as a team and create a beautiful place to be and live. And one of the initiatives that happened started right before I got there. I've been at Northern for 14 years now and seeing it through

16:13three different actually technically four different presidents in those 14 years and that's kind of an unheard of thing too. That kind of turnover is not normal. But it started with the first one that I came into President Wong who's subsequently moved to San Francisco colleges he created two things with the community. One was Northern Initiatives and the other was called NMU Invent. NMU Invent I'll start with that one is a cradle to grave process where we take anybody from the community to a student and they are a series of engineers and designers

16:43that help take an idea and turn it into a product and get it into production. From there they go over to Northern Initiatives which is designed to help people understand how to operate business how to get logo and marketing going for their businesses and most importantly they're connecting those individuals whether they're students or members of the community with the banks for funding so that they can build the businesses in our community that stay in our the work can go anywhere but it's about making the staying in Marquette attainable

17:14living in a small town that's on the shores of Superior which is an absolute tourist mecca and destination but it's also a place where we live and the values that we have kind of get given off to the people that come and visit and we hope that we take that back with them. So those sorts of programs managed to survive some of the one of our presidents that was on the right side of the world and who was trying to dismantle the programs internally but they kept the larger organizations together and now we have

17:44a new president that is building an arts corridor through the entire university and making sure that it extends into town from amphitheaters to public spaces just ways to celebrate the arts and keep people engaged to make them feel welcome so there isn't a wall between those two places but it's also allowing the community to have a say in how things are going and I came from the University of Notre Dame where it had its own zip code and then South Bend outside of it is its own zip code the other zip code just a mile away

18:14and that South Bend was at the mercy of a large school like that that at that day in the 2000s was not engaging or supporting the town and it was faltering but at this point I should say rather than getting down that diatribe we are where there is a two-way street conversations between students potential students community members and allowing everybody to have a voice in our town and how we want to live and what we find of value are you finding when students graduate

18:45they really want to stay the mass majority of them want to stay almost every alumni that I stay in touch with says the same thing I've been trying to get back there I want to be in Marquette that's where I found my people that's where I found kinship that was where affirmation occurred and they felt free to be creative and to take chances I mean that's the whole thing it's always about community always that's what's going to bring you back that's what's going to keep you there that's what's going to that's what you're going to lean on when things get hard in our community now we've had four of our professors

19:15are part of the MAPS which is the Marquette Arts and Planning Committee we've got people that are in the surrounding townships my wife works on the township committee and is becoming a township supervisor we're seeing more students becoming engaged in the place where they live and not just being transient but having a voice there and engaging with what I call civic responsibility to step up and be part of it where our mayor is sub 30 and we just who previous to that individual was in their 70s

19:46so we have a very different again progressive minded and open to new ideas and ways of treating people I mean that's what kind of a big part of it right is like you want to create the environment you want to live in right so like you have to start being on boards serving on commissions running for mayor city council like if you want an arts community then you just have to make it yeah you have to make it you have to be part of it you have to have a voice and you have to give other people a voice give them a chance the money is there it is there but you have to kind of like just with administrators

20:16in the institution you have to be in front of them if you're going to sit by and wait for somebody else to do the work somebody else to start the conversation it won't happen they're not they're not but if you if you have an idea and you just keep pounding it down and keep hammering away at it people will start to start to see the vision sometimes you have to show it to them and point it out and show them by example but when you start to show them the example of the vision people get on board pretty quickly and then they go oh you know actually I do have money for that I have money

20:47for you I've got money for your team and then it just starts to snowball and when you're engaging on that level I think when you have the right folks in there it's beyond politics while politics are clearly an issue if you can drop that and get past the negativity and look at you're connecting with a person and if ultimately you can connect with values of how you want to live and what you want that environment to look like whether it's for your kids or your animals they're there to connect with you and they will hear you and they're there to support you across the aisle

21:17I mean it is sometimes hard to take politics out of things but I think the vast majority of people can see eye to eye and you have to set politics aside because otherwise you're not going to get anything done well I want to back up from the community discussion and talk about resilience individual resilience when we first started talking about this panel one of the major things was to discuss defunding of schools and we started to think about how could we talk about this could we get a K-12 person to talk about that could we talk

21:48to a university professor about that but I also was thinking like could we talk to a student who was in a school that went from a thriving school to a school that was really struggling what would that be like and we couldn't find the right particular person to be on the panel but I think what it brings up for me is resilience you know is the ability for us to change the way we think about what we do

22:19and where we find support and I've always found a lot of support in community actions that are not necessarily institutional so for instance when I was a student I really got into wood firing like many of us do and I love wood fire pots but I really love the wood fire community like I love that I could go show up at a kiln put in my labor get shared labor experience out of it and also have an aesthetic experience so I wondered

22:50if either of you would talk about individual resilience through sort of hard times in your own educational path or in the case of your communities or sort of community resilience through something like wood firing or building an art center or building some other opportunity like that so do you have any thoughts on that the most recent is and due to being active due to being a loud voice in a small town there was a panel of us that were selected by the Michigan Department of Film and Media

23:21and they chose six sites around the six cities around the state of Michigan to give these investments to build some type of community driven change and what we ended up doing there was a panel of ten of us that ranged from business members to ceramic artists the whole panel and we were given a grant for $300,000 and we started with we built a co-working space and that co-working space after the first year held 46 different companies in it some companies as large as 15 employees and other companies that had one

23:51employee in it and they were just using a shared desk now we had the funding to last for three years and it became successful it was self-running and it was taking care of itself but we ran out of the funding in our own time we ended up then selling that to another place I called a campfire and that campfire became not just the same co-working space but it also started to give people connect to people with the tech industry to teach them about how they could work remotely or be out here in the middle of nowhere and still be having a conversation

24:22in the greater picture be it regional like state regional or national or even international so being part with that group I think that was the turning point for me that I found out that Marquette I wasn't going to live out of backpack anymore Marquette was a place to be I wanted to live there I wanted to settle down because these were people that were active from all different corners of education and demographics or where they came from but they all had that same goal which was we're here to support the growth of this place of

24:53individuals and not make it about themselves I hear that so whenever in the fall when all the academic transformation was happening it was pretty pretty grim over in Morgantown I went over to the studio and everyone was very defeated but time was worn on and everyone's moved into the acceptance phase of the situation but we've all kind of decided that you

25:24can be sad and cry about it or you can create opportunities and so in this situation with this ACRE program it's through Bridgeway Capital and it is out of Pittsburgh and they've taken this cohort of 25 people that are all arts related and they're giving us a one year business plan business education and to showcase our goods they're going to do photo shoots they're going to do workshops on taxes so in an effort to get these

25:5424 people that might have just moved through town to stay and start a business we've also had other opportunities with the Tamarack Foundation to initiate like a first Friday initiative and so all of that before when things were going fine I don't know if people would have sought out these kind of opportunities because you're just doing the thing you're at the university and it's business as usual but in situations where there's these huge seismic shifts in stability and funding

26:25it forces you to be like okay we've got to bootstrap this thing we have to figure out what we're going to do and so that's kind of where this big pivot has happened where people are like we're going to take Maddox into our own hands and see if we can get some outside resources to make this town a go so I wanted to think about how art centers play into this you know when I look out into the audience I can see some university professors and I think you know a lot of what our focus at the

26:55NSECA level is is universities and I think partially that's because universities were good organizers but as university funding goes up and down what I've seen is that art centers have been springing up and you guys might have seen this yourselves everywhere like think about actually when you look at old ceramics monthlies it's really interesting to look at the ads and to see who is offering workshops in the 80s and then look at ceramics monthly

27:25now and see who's offering workshops now and there are so many more art centers now than there were then and I think it's because the desire for ceramic education has not changed I think it's exploded right yeah definitely it continues to increase yeah and actually we're going to keep talking about demographics because that's such a big part of the thing I remember about five years ago I was teaching a lot of workshops and I noticed that all of the workshop participants had either just retired

27:56and they were part of the baby boomer generation that was retiring or they were just coming out of college there was no one in the middle so everyone was in their 20s or they're in their 60s and I thought that that was that was so interesting that those two groups of people felt comfortable in an art center because one of the things through discussions of equity that have been happening in the field in the last two or three years is talking about like where do people feel comfortable and this is something that I just want to ask you

28:27as audience members is where do you feel the most comfortable to have an educational experience it might be in a university it might be the place that you get a accredited degree but it might be at the art center down the street where you can take a class that's not graded there's no pressure it is really you having a personal educational experience