Audrey Shulman '09 produced a video, wrote a children's book...

"I really wanted a change," says Audrey Shulman '09.

Going from an academic magnet school in the heart of downtown Nashville, TN, where "we were hardly ever allowed to go outside" to the wooded Bennington College campus in southwestern Vermont, Audrey found the change she was looking for—and it was more than a change of scenery.

Her first term at Bennington—which included classes like "Shakespeare: The Tragedies" and "Teaching Young Children"—reawakened her love of literature, and sparked a new interest as well: education. Shulman sought out a Field Work Term internship that would combine the two. Her job at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York City allowed her to not only combine them, but put them into practice in a real-world setting.

"I loved it," Shulman says. "I worked for the education department, which meant that I got to sit in on classes that were taught at the museum. The classes were ranged from the civil rights movement to the portrayal of women in TV to the cold war, and I was able to learn how these museum educators taught using materials drawn from the museum's collections—and not only that, but actually help put the presentations together. If someone was teaching a fourth-grade class about interviewing techniques, I would look through the museum's collection and find clips that would illustrate the points. It was really wonderful." Among the perks of the job was an unlimited free pass to every museum in New York City. "I spent every weekend going to museums."

The internship helped Shulman begin to clarify another common thread running through the classes she had chosen: media and communication in its many forms. In her Introduction to Video class, she directed and edited a video that juxtaposed scenes from a young woman's daily routine with clips from various films, exploring "the pressures of media in the back of our minds." In her Children's Literature class, she collaborated with a classmate to write and illustrate a children's book about a little girl who is a pathological liar--until her lies start coming true. "We spent hours and hours creating our illustrations out of construction paper," Shulman says. "When we presented it to the class, they said we should get it published." And just as she had done at the Museum of Television and Radio, Shulman's studies back at Bennington often examined the interaction between the arts and media and society: A paper for a theater class explored the role of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House in spurring on the women's movement.

Captivated by what she was learning about video, Shulman didn't want to call it quits when June rolled around. She decided to continue to hone her skills independently over the summer. "I'm making a movie called Aqua Jogger. It's a pseudo-documentary about a girl who's in training for the aqua jogging Olympics, which don't actually exist. My friends and I wrote the story and shot the movie on about a $150 budget, and soon I'm going to be editing it.

"I can't wait to get back to campus and show it in [Bennington's film screening theater] Kinoteca."

Courses Audrey Took in her First Year:

Fall Term:

• Shakespeare: The Tragedies with Steven Bach.
• Teaching Young Children with Vanessa la Rae. "I loved that I was required to work in the Early Childhood Center as part of my class. How wonderful to be able to work and play with two-year-olds during the morning and then learn about their development in class at night."
• The History of Theater with Kathleen Dimmick.
• Intro to Video with Laura Parnes. "I was introduced to a lot of different styles of video and independent projects in my class, and really challenged myself to experiment with different ideas in my weekly assignments and final project."
• Visual Arts Lecture Series. "Hearing about artists from a variety of fields always made my Tuesday nights very inspiring and stimulating. I was influenced by the video artists to try different techniques in my own work in video."
  
  

Field Work Term:

• Internship with the Museum of Television and Radio, New York, NY
  
  

Spring Term:

• Children's Literature with Vanessa la Rae. "I loved exploring all genres of children's literature in my class, and writing and illustration a children's book with my best friend for our final project."
• Austen and the Brontes, from Sense to Sensibility with April Bernard. "April's intensive class discussions and readings reminded me how much I love literature."
• Beginning Playwriting with Caridad Svich. "Caridad gave my class really challenging and necessary assignments: writing a play with two other classmates, desigining a play for a specific space, creating a play with no words, etc. I learned so much from her feedback and from felt able to explore ideas during our 'free writing' time."
• Piano lessons with Daniel Koppel.
• Visual Arts Lecture Series.

Click here to read Chris Broadfoot's story.