Staffer uses arts to introduce the academic experience

On the office wall of 7116 Helen C. White, you’ll see two people frozen in photographic immortality: Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland. The two mute musicians actually say a lot about the office occupant, Larry Edgerton, and so do certain books on his table with intriguing titles such as “Early Benjamin Britten” and “Examples of Gregorian Chant” – intriguing because this is not the office of a music professor, but of a man who uses music and other arts to give wing to the thoughts of his students.

Edgerton is an academic staff member who’s been a senior developmental skills specialist and writing instructor in the College of Letters and Science for 18 years. And for the last 10 years he’s taught for the Summer Collegiate Experience (SCE) of L&S, which gives about 30 incoming minority freshmen an intense eight-week taste of college life.

That taste includes several flavors flowing forth from Edgerton, who teaches a course on “Approaches to Critical Thinking and Writing.” And much of the piquancy of his course comes from the arts, which Edgerton uses as an entry point.

“My overall goal is to introduce students to art forms and give them a language to talk about the works,” he says. “I want them to talk critically about the arts.”

For instance, Edgerton will show his class the Orson Welles’ movie “Citizen Kane,” then ask them, “Is this movie really great as so many say? Or is it an example of illogic called the bandwagon appeal?”

Or he might take the class to see abstract art in the Elvehjem Museum or show them a subtitled performance of the Puccini opera “La Boheme.” Just the sheer experience of seeing a new art form and trying to understand it can leave a student wide-eyed with wonder.

“I had a student who saw his first opera during SCE,” says Edgerton, “and he said, ‘If this is what opera is all about, then I’m moving to Italy.’ ”

The writing regimen is rigorous in Edgerton’s class. Students write 10 pieces over eight weeks, with each assignment involving two to three drafts. “I stress editing,” says Edgerton. “I want students to not only think well, but to produce sentences that work well.”

His course also helps students stay on track at the college level through units on notetaking, library use and research paper design. “That practical stuff can derail a lot of freshmen,” he says. “If I had my way, every freshman would take this kind of course.”

Edgerton is remarkably successful with students, says Consuelo Lopez Springfield, assistant dean at L&S. “One SCE graduate told me she learned more from Larry in his course than she had in all of high school.”

One way he expands their intellectual repertoire is by shrinking, through his demeanor, the pedagogical chasm between them and him. “I’m just one scholar trying to hook up with others,” he says. “We’re all in the same boat, trying to make sense of things.”

Edgerton and other SCE staff have clearly had an impact, L&S analysts have found: The retention rates for SCE graduates from freshman to senior years run about 5 percent higher than campuswide figures for minorities. “The SCE students learn they don’t have to be afraid of a high-powered university,” he says.

Edgerton himself was afraid at times as an undergraduate – of getting gassed. He was at UC-Berkeley from 1969 to 1973, when students frequently had occasion to sniff the delicate and tantalizing Essence of Tear Gas. “I wasn’t on the front lines – usually,” he says with a smile.

But even during those chaotic days, he fed his passion for the arts by minoring in music and, as he did growing up in Chariton and Iowa City, Iowa, by playing violin in orchestras. Later, as a doctoral student at UW–Madison, he minored in musicology and majored in American literature.

Edgerton has long been fascinated by connections between music and literature. “For example, the way Bach organized his cantatas has parallels in rhetorical organization,” he says.

He’s also studied and been inspired by talented people who can perform at a high level in both fields. Among them are poet Ezra Pound, who wrote an opera; author Anthony Burgess (“Clockwork Orange”), who wrote string quartets; and author Paul Bowles (“The Sheltering Sky”), who wrote three operas.

Edgerton marbles music and literature in his own life. He not only uses music in his writing course, he composes on his piano at home. He’s written a string quartet and clarinet sonata and now is composing a series of songs about swans.

And he’s the author of two books published by Kendall/Hunt: “What We Owe the Reader: A Resource Workbook for Writers” (third edition just out) and “The Editing Book: 101 Problems and Solutions.”

Oh, he’s done something else, too, something you can rent at Four Star Video on State Street: the schlock horror film, “Blood Hook.” He co-wrote the movie in 1986, and the director was Jim Mallon, former head of the student Pail and Shovel Party at UW–Madison and now producer and director of “Mystery Science Theater 3000” on the Sci-Fi Channel. The film tells of a crazed North Woods fisherman with a plate in his head that sets him off on murderous rampages directed at tourists from Illinois.

The things that set Edgerton off in a nonrampageous way are not Illinois tourists – well, maybe sometimes – but sloppy writing and mushy thinking. His artful antidote for those lamentable conditions will be offered again during this summer’s SCE program. With Edgerton as a gentle guide, the arts are an avenue to sharper perception and more lucid, graceful expression.

And that, for incoming freshmen, can be a yellow brick road indeed.