Teaching with the Lights On (2016)
Borrowing its name from Virginia B. Spivey’s website on active learning in art history, this session asks: What do you do to “turn the lights on” in undergraduate art history classes? What strategies have worked to engage students in the history of art, while providing a break from darkened lecture halls and a seemingly endless stream of names and dates? And how do you encourage students to make connections between the history of art and the contemporary world? Or are there other ways to make historical topics feel relevant to students? This session provides an opportunity to discuss recent developments in art history pedagogy and to share knowledge, practices and experiences. We welcome brief presentations (5-10 minutes) that highlight pedagogical methods or describe particular activities and assignments.
Anne Dymond, University of Lethbridge
Andrea Korda, University of Alberta, Augustana Faculty
“Curating Sackville”
Anne Koval, Mount Allison University
What happens in a seminar on curating and critical writing when students are assigned the task of curating their own exhibitions? Curating Sackville was the resulting project where undergraduate students curated art/archival material for exhibitions at Mount Allison University and within the small community of Sackville, NB. This assignment fulfilled a number of pedagogical goals including: group-work dynamics; negotiating venues within different communities, both university and town; interacting with university and community artists; creative problem solving; communicating to different audiences; designing posters and pamphlets; risk-taking; and professionalization in the application of classroom theory and discussion to a real-time exhibition. Curating Sackville provided an experiential opportunity to learn “with the lights on”, and enabled students to understand the complexity and practice of curating.
Digital Tools for Increasing Student Participation in Art History Classes
Thomas Stubblefield, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth
This presentation will focus on the use of digital tools as a means to increase student participation and promote mastery of concepts in upper division Art History classes. Of particular interest will be a “Friend a Theorist” Facebook activity in which students are asked to assume the identity of a prominent theorist and build an online profile that reflects the ideas of his or her work. As students network with other student/theorists as this persona, they collectively build a cognitive map which exposes the interconnections and evolution of theory in a language that is familiar to them. Along the way, the activity raises pertinent issues concerning the potentials and pitfalls of the network as a historiographic tool.
Fun and Games in the Classroom: An Interactive Approach to Art History Instruction
Tracey Eckersley, Kentucky College of Art and Design
I teach at a newly-formed art college that serves talented and creative individuals who often lack strong academic backgrounds. Hoping to engage students unaccustomed to traditional classroom lectures, I developed a series of interactive, game-based learning experiences. Some class sessions include role-playing as museum professionals, with students debating the authenticity of objects or the fate of the Parthenon Marbles. Others take us out of the classroom for gallery scavenger hunts. This interactive approach extends to homework, for which students play topical video games in addition to more traditional reading assignments. Test review is presented as Jeopardy- or Family Feud-style game shows, complete with prizes. Through these activities, students take ownership of the class material and become deeply engaged with issues regarding cultural heritage and the art market. Their subsequent affinity for the artworks and people that we study has resulted in greater information retention and academic success.
Creating Purpose and Connecting with the Local Environment: Writing about Modern Architecture
Liz Lawson, MacEwan University
The notion of ‘purpose’, theorized by Daniel H. Pink has recently informed pedagogical design and provided a method for understanding the factors that motivate students inside and outside the classroom. Purposeful teaching should bridge the gap between what students learn in the classroom and what is available in their local environment. The absence of large public galleries and museums in many learning environments can make the writing of object histories challenging. However, modern architecture as a topic is highly accessible and gives students the chance to discuss form and context on a local scale. This presentation will examine how junior level students can utilize their own environment for meaningful historical research. Assignment templates and rubrics will also be discussed.
Material Matters: Art-Making as Historical Inquiry
Jamie Kemp, Quest University
What can the experience of making art teach students of art history about the social contexts of artistic production? What can working through instructional texts written by artists teach us about the construction of artistic personas? For this session I propose to discuss an assignment in which my students attempted to replicate historical art-making techniques using primary source texts and modern materials. Student projects included the creation of a working reproduction of one of Albrecht Dürer’s perspective machines based on instructions found in The Painter’s Manual, a reconstruction of Leonardo da Vinci’s parabolic compass as sketched in his notebooks, a socially-driven embroidery project described in a Victorian edition of “The Girl’s Own Paper,” and an exercise in psychic automatism directed by Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto. Throughout the semester, students used hands-on experiences to interrogate their complex and shifting relationships with the people and objects they study.
Home Sweet Home – Or Is It? Site Specificity’s Contribution to a Critical Pedagogy
Andrea Terry, Lakehead University
Using Colville House on Mount Allison University’s campus, I examine how site specificity promotes a critical pedagogy. In 2009, the University opened Colville House – once the residence of artist Alex Colville (1920-2013) and his family (1949-73) – as a “portal” to explore Colville’s contributions to the locale. 1 In 2012, I organized Unpacking Museums, an art history seminar course exploring the socio-political motivations that determine museum programming and how artists might intervene in order to propose a series of possibilities for Colville House. The course design, site-specific focus, and classes held in the House transformed the site into a space of learning as we came together, considering connections between institutionalized relationships, the politics of place, Canada’s art narrative, and Colville’s role in that so as to confront the utility and futility of the art historical cannon.
Turn on the Lights and Show and Tell in a Second-Year Undergraduate Course
Linda Steer, Brock University
I propose to speak briefly about how I connect the history of early photographic portraiture to contemporary family photographs in ways that are meaningful to students in my second-year survey course entitled “History of Photography.” After learning about the early days of photographic portraiture, along with the invention of the Kodak camera and the social implications of that invention, students are asked to bring one of their family photographs to class. They then work through a series of questions in groups and present their findings to the rest of the class. The questions investigate the differences between studio and snapshot photographs, the ways in which family roles are constructed and mediated through photographs, and the affective power of such photographs, particularly in relation to memory. It is an effective in-class assignment that engages students by asking them to connect their own history and experience with what they have learned in class.
