Written by Virginia Spivey, Contributing Editor at Art History Teaching Resources (AHTR)
Check out the Art History Pedagogy & Practice e-journal hub at Art History Teaching Resources (AHTR), and read the linked White Paper. AHTR is a peer-populated platform for art history teaching content including lesson plans, book reviews, image clusters, and classroom and museum activities.
Over the summer, AHTR worked with the research firm of Randi Korn & Associates to conduct a survey that revealed significant interest in this project. AHTR is excited about the potential of Art History Pedagogy and Practice to build bridges connecting the traditionally siloed community of academic art historians to others involved in SOTL, museum education and art education at the K-16 level, and the digital humanities. AHTR recently launched an “e-journal hub” where regular updates will be posted about Art History Pedagogy and Practice, along with information and resources about SOTL and best practices in educational research. As we move forward in this endeavor, we encourage visitors to visit the site to provide feedback and comments about the project.
While art historians in higher education devote extensive amounts of time, effort, and energy to the job of teaching, the attitude persists that this role is separate, or even a distraction, from the primary responsibility to contribute as scholars in the field. Maintaining the duality of teaching and scholarly activity devalues the crucial relationship of pedagogical practice to art historical study, and precludes the potential for research in teaching and learning to have significant impact on the discipline itself. In order to realize this potential, the scholarship of teaching and learning in art history (SOTH-AH) must be acknowledged as a legitimate area of intellectual inquiry by the institutions and communities encompassing academic art history. A peer-reviewed journal devoted to SOTL-AH would facilitate this process by providing scholars a space to share research on pedagogical topics, and encourage further academic investigation and discourse around teaching and learning in art history.
This white paper identifies the need for SOTL-AH based on a recent survey of art historians in higher education and a review of current literature addressing pedagogical topics. It considers the impact an academic journal devoted to this topic would have on the art history and related fields that include study of visual and material culture. As a solution to the lack of SOTL-AH, Art History Teaching Resources (AHTR) began Art History Pedagogy and Practice (AHPP), a peer-reviewed e-journal, that will advance and disseminate academic research on art history’s pedagogy. This initiative builds on the community and pedagogical inquiry AHTR has developed since its launch in 2011. AHPP will be housed on Academic Works, CUNY’s Digital Commons repository as an open-access publication that will impose no subscription or contributor fees.
Stay Tuned
Check the AHPP e-journal hub for updates about the e-journal and to learn more about ways to become involved with Art History Pedagogy & Practice.
In light of recent events concerning the situation in Ferguson, Missouri, and the ongoing protests, conversations, debates, arguments, emotional outpourings, and moments for learning that are occurring for all of us, I simply wanted to post some links to resources that might help support teaching and learning during this time of crisis and healing. Or perhaps to just start — or continue to build — a process of learning and peaceful conversation. Most of these have been circulating since August, and I have found them extremely useful for my own personal learning as well as broader implications for museum teaching practice. If any museums, libraries, teachers, or schools are utilizing other resources in terms of addressing these pressing issues with your communities, students, and audiences, please add them in the Comments section below or send them to me directly at murawski27@gmail.com so I can add them here. This is considered as an organic, growing list of resources sourced by the ArtMuseumTeaching.com community and our readership.
My heart goes out to everyone in my hometown of St. Louis. Please stay safe.
“Whether you find yourself teaching in a schoolhouse, in your living room with your children, at a community meeting filled with movement members, in a church basement with others who seek racial reconciliation, or in a detention center common room, [these] resources … provide a snapshot of what is being taught, what is being felt, and what is being created each day.” – Marcia Chatelain
“Teaching the #FergusonSyllabus,” by Dr. Marcia Chatelain for Dissent Magazine online, reflecting on the #FergusonSyllabus project after the Grand Jury decision pertaining to Ferguson, Missouri.
#FergusonSyllabus hashtag on Twitter, developed by Marcia Chatelain as a way for educators to share ideas on how to talk about Ferguson in their classrooms.
“Time and Space to Learn and Reflect,”by David Cohen, written for the blog of the Accomplished California Teachers (ACT), a teacher leadership network for the state of California.
The Illipsis: on Ferguson, riots and human limits— in this second installment of The Illipsis, Jay Smooth looks back at the events in #Ferguson and asks how we can truly apply Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s advice that “riots are the language of the unheard.”
Katherine Brooks wrote a short piece for HuffingtonPost on December 5th that surveyed how artists have been quick to echo the nation’s near constant calls for justice and clarity in the wake of Michael Brown’s killing in Ferguson, Missouri. As she writes, “The landscape of St. Louis might be marred by isolated acts of vandalism and law enforcement crackdowns, but art is still flourishing.”
Margaret Middleton of the Boston Children’s Museum started the Twitter hashtag #museumsrespondtoFerguson, and also launched a Pinterest board “Museum Response to Ferguson” for people to pin useful resources. Both are worth checking out.
“#BlackLivesMatter – Teachers and Students,” (VIDEO EMBEDDED BELOW) a live conversation on December 10, 2014, from Teachers Teaching Teachers and EdTechTalk, a collaborative open educational technology community. Thanks to the amazing Paul Allison and everyone who participated in these conversations.
“Ferguson – Share what you are learning and teaching,”(VIDEO EMBEDDED BELOW) a live conversation on December 7, 2014, from Teachers Teaching Teachers and EdTechTalk, a collaborative open educational technology community. Thanks to the amazing Paul Allison who hosted the conversation with Renee Watson, Christopher Rodgers, Chris Sloan, and Janae Williams to talk about police brutality, the murder of black men, racism, and what we are teaching after Ferguson, Michael Brown, Eric Garner… and more.
“In moments like the reaction to Brown’s death, we need more engagement, not less, and each of us has something to offer.” –David M. Perry, Dominican University
“#FergusonSyllabus: 10 Clips to Stimulate Classroom Discussion,”from Alisa Gross at the Acclaim Blog, that offers several suggestions for news footage and clips from documentaries to stimulate discussion about social justice, protest, and the roles of news media and perspective.
“Teaching #BlackLivesMatter: Countering the Pedagogies of Anti-Black Racism,” Friday, December 19, The Graduate Center, CUNY. An event where we can think through how to address racialization and state power as scholar-teachers, working at the level of both immediately executable plans for teaching/research, and longer term strategies for making the academy accountable to racial violence. The event will begin by breaking into smaller groups and contributing to a collaborative syllabus. Please feel free to add to it beforehand, or if you can’t be at the event, join the Google Doc around 10:00 am next Friday (12/19).
#MuseumsRespondToFerguson – Margaret Middleton of the Boston Children’s Museum began this hashtag now being used to track the way that museums are responding to issues related to Ferguson. Middleton also created a Pinterest Board “Museum Response to Ferguson” with relevant links and resources.
TWITTER CHAT: Dec. 17, 2014, 2-3 PM (EST). Join this live Twitter chat on social justice, advocacy, and the museum field’s responses to the issues of racism, injustice, and police brutality. Follow and join the conversation using the tag#museumsrespondtoferguson.
Preface by Betsy Andersen, Founding Director of Museo Eduardo Carrillo
At the start of 2013, Museo Eduardo Carrillo began to explore the potential of curating original exhibitions online. We determined that our focus would be on mid-career artists whose engagement in their art continued well past their college years. We drew inspiration from The International Museum of Women and Museo de las Mujers de Costa Rico who have long been pairing art with thoughtful essays.
Lorraine García-Nakata, “The Alchemist,” Pastel on Paper, 29”x 30,” 2005
One of our goals was to allow the artist to select a writer who they felt would expand the experience of their art through the written word. It has been a thrilling collaborative process. As one of few online museums and as the only artist endowed foundation to represent a Mexican American artist, innovation is part of Museo Eduardo Carrillo’s DNA.
When I began a conversation with San Francisco-based artist Lorraine Garcia-Nakata and Cornell University Associate Professor Ella Diaz the exhibition took on a new dimension. In this partnership, the Museo would not only host an online exhibition and essay, but also extend the experience to Professor Diaz’s undergraduate students. Her students would examine the art through the “testimonio” framework which was the focus of the class. It was an innovative and forward thinking idea. And we welcomed it wholeheartedly.
Because Eduardo Carrillo was an influential artist and Professor of Art at University of California Santa Cruz for 25 years until his death at age 60 in 1997, Museo has felt that part of our mission is to encourage scholarship in the next generation by giving those students an opportunity to have their work published. Because the essays were so thoughtful and well written under Professor Diaz’s guidance, Museo did publish them online and they remain in Museo’s “On View” archives with the exhibition Navigating by Hand: The Art of Lorraine Garcia-Nakata.
Future exhibitions include the work of artist Jose Lozano with an essay by Professor Dianna Santillano and The Duron Family collection with Professor KarenMary Davalos. We are looking ahead to furthering this experiment that Professor Diaz instigated.
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Written by Ella Diaz, Cornell University
Lorraine García-Nakata: Navigating By Hand, an online exhibition of historically important Chicana artist Lorraine García-Nakata, was launched at the Museo Eduardo Carrillo in November 2013. This retrospective sampling of work, spanning several decades, was seeded by a separate exhibit I curated for the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in San Francisco, that included her work. Over conversation, Lorraine and I found easy nexus regarding artistic practice as social change, public pedagogy, and Chicana aestheticism, evolving from 1960/1970s civil rights philosophies informing both professional and personal choices––values often absent in art institutions that default to viewing art minus the broader human context.
Lorraine García-Nakata, “Friends, No Matter What,” Charcoal/Pastel On Paper, 7′ x 4′ 2” , 2008
When Lorraine asked me to write a curatorial statement for her solo exhibit, I agreed. The web-based format offered room for in-depth survey of her work that would identify and interpret its complexity and related cultural grounding. Being an artist, writer, and a museum professional, Lorraine shared that curatorial statements about artists of color often play it safe, hovering obvious descriptions of art, a historical idea, or repeating culturally flat references. Having read my published article, “Seeing is Believing: Visualizing Autobiography, Performing Testimonio: New Directions in Latina/o and Chicana/o Visual Aesthetic” (published 2011 in Chicana/Latina Studies: The Journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social), Lorraine appreciated my view of Latina/o and Chicana/o visual and performance artists who push autobiographical literary boundaries and testimonio by telling their stories as collective experience, bearing witness to sociopolitical and historical events in non-written forms.
Testimonio literature is integral to Latin American and Chicana/o and U.S. Latina/a literary canon, offering an individual’s story reflecting a whole community, urgent human circumstance, and significance/meaning of daily life. Having scheduled a 2013 fall course at Cornell University on testimonio, along with my conversations with Lorraine, I designed curriculum engaging literary testimonio and alternative visual and performing art forms that would test boundaries of this literary genre.
From I, Rigoberta Menchú (1984), a canonical testimonio, to Latina Feminist Group’s formative anthology, Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios (2001), this course included testimonio as educational praxis, an important component of Chicano/a Studies pedagogy. Incorporating Lorraine’s body of work, the course linked to the Museo Eduardo Carrillo’s online exhibition launched in November 2013. After a semester of critical inquiry of the testimonio genre and visual analysis of 1960s and 1970s civil rights murals, students were adept in this literary form. With close review of Lorraine’s visual art and selected writings, students began writing (see Museo’s website archive) revealing how García-Nakata visualizes her story as a comprehensive experience, testifying to the power of everyday life. Students conveyed, in clear resonant voices, how Lorraine speaks to viewers through her life events, childhood innocence, hopes, vulnerability, desires in later years, and raising of children.
Student Photo: From left to right: Professor Ella Diaz, Sarah Proo, Ashley Elizondo, Carmen Martínez, Stephanie Martinez, Elizabeth Ferrie, Kerry Close, Eamari Bell, & Gabriela Leon. (Not pictured: Phoebe Houston)
Working with an artist and a museum, I designed a dynamic, interdisciplinary pedagogy for students regarding genres of Latina/Chicana prose. Students considered ways we tell our stories beyond printed autobiography. Through interpretation of works by Lorraine Garcia-Nakata as narrative, they made insightful commentary that she digested and the public witnessed.
When young, I took myself through a disciplined process resulting in a clear understanding that my life required the creative process. From that point, it was never a question, rather a quest informing my life as an artist, parent, art/cultural specialist, and as a museum professional who introduced to the field progressive best practices linked to redefinitions of community, further evolution of curatorial and public programs, development of partnerships of mutual benefit and related reciprocity, and use of accurate terminology.
As Latino contemporary artistic work has become part of the broader aesthetic, I’ve expected research, interpretation, and related writing (from within and outside our culture) to delve the complexity of Latino cultures: Chicano(a), Uruguayan, Indigenous, Caribbean, Afro Cuban, Afro North American, other cultures of Latin America, and the growing population of mixed race contemporary youth that embrace all parts of their identity. I’ve also expected exhibitions to expand beyond, and not regularly default to, group or cultural holiday exhibits. When Cornell Professor Ella Diaz approached me about an exhibit focused on figurative art by women of color, I agreed to lend my work. As a next generation, first voice (from within the culture) scholar/curator, Ella was not afraid to critique periods of our contemporary Latino history (that later evolved), such as the gender-biased framework of early phases of the Chicano movement or initial perceptions/invisibility of our LGBT Latino population. Ella also possessed a capacity to witness, interpret, and scribe the nuance of my artistic work, which is not overt or linked to the “expected” Latino iconography or color palette.
When approached by the Museo Eduardo Carrillo regarding a solo online exhibition, I agreed only if Professor Diaz could write the curatorial statement. It also seemed important for the Museum Director, Betsy Andersen, and Ella to meet. An interpretive component was developed by Ella, which included a Cornell graduate seminar focused on my work. I was delighted that students would research my work in depth and produce individual writings. I was excited to read them. For an artist, museum exhibitions are important as well as research of one’s work by a key academic institution. Cornell student writings were published on the Museo’s website, adding another important educational/interpretive element. We all worked hard to mount this exhibit, and it was clearly of mutual benefit to the Museo, myself as artist, Professor Diaz as curator, and participating Cornell students. The online exhibition provided a multi-level experience for the viewing public and offered a forum for publishing research by our next generation scholars.
While I am active in the local/national community, my artistic work is not obvious or overt in its protest or politic, but it does testify. It also challenges assumptions about how we live, how we intend our action. Being an artist, writer, and musician can be solitary and hard work. It’s a responsibility. Yet, I have long since committed my life to this practice and it will continue to be how I navigate my life.
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Click the link below to read the essays written by nine undergraduate students at Cornell University who enrolled in Professor Ella Diaz’s fall 2013 course “Telling to Live: Critical Examinations of Testimonio.”
BETSY ANDERSEN: Founding Director of Museo Eduardo Carrillo, created to extend the artist’s work and compassionate legacy into the world. Andersen received her Bachelor of Arts from University of California, Santa Cruz. Since that time she has enjoyed being the host of a radio interview show devoted to the visual arts and has explored producing documentaries on regional artists.
ELLA MARIA DIAZ: earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from the College of William and Mary, teaching several courses at William and Mary and developing the College’s first Chicana Literature course in spring 2005. Her research pertains to the interdependence of Chicano/a and U.S. Latino/a literary and visual cultures. Her dissertation, “Flying Under the Radar with The Royal Chicano Air Force: The Ongoing Politics of Space and Ethnic Identity” explores these intersections and, for this project, she received The College of William and Mary’s Distinguished Dissertation Award in 2010. She was a Lecturer in The School of Interdisciplinary Studies at the San Francisco Art Institute between 2006—2012. Her current book project explores the historical consciousness of a Chicano/a arts collective that produced major and canonical works of poetry, art, and literature. Diaz has published through Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, U.C. Santa Barbara’s ImaginArte, and in Chicana/Latina Studies: The Journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social.
LORRAINE GARCÍA-NAKATA: Since 1973, Lorraine García-Nakata has been a “pilot” with the world-renowned Sacramento Chicano artist collective, the Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF). One of six original primary muralists, Lorraine was the only female artist asked to join her fellow pilots José Montoya, Esteban Villa, Juanishi Orosco, Stan Padilla, and Juan Cervantes in painting the renowned and historic South Side Mural located in Sacramento, California. Ms. García-Nakata is a recognized visual artist and has exhibited extensively since 1970 on a local, regional, national and international level. Adept in a range of visual arts medium, she is noted for her large-scale works in drawing and painting. Lorraine is also recognized for her command of mixed media, printmaking, installation work, ceramics, and sculpture.
Invisible Pedagogies (IP) is a collective that works on the creation of a space in which we can rethink the relationship between art and education. It was born in Madrid in 2009 and was formed by educators from different areas such as high schools, colleges, community contexts, and art centers. It was created of the need we felt to look for new ways of thinking about the theory and practice in art education. We met while taking a doctorate course entitled Didactics of Suspicion, whose professor, Maria Acaso, is now the director of most of our doctorate studies. A strong bond was created between us, and it still helps us to become stronger in our struggle against the establishment. We were born as a “self-doctorate” (self taught) group who deals with theory but because of our methodological nature, yet based upon action-research strategies, we were soon forced into practice.
On the other hand, invisible pedagogies is a concept that already existed before the collective, exploring education beyond the boundaries of the curriculum and considering pedagogical elements that hadn’t been addressed in the learning-teaching experience until now. Invisible pedagogies is the reflection upon the non-explicit micro-discourses that all-together form the macro-discourse that is the pedagogical act. And although they remain on a second level, they are likely to transform the body and soul of the participants involved in it.
In other words, the teaching act is a mediated performance in the same way that a theatrical performance is mediated and its different elements (micro-discourses) will make up a pedagogical narrative. What do our students in class, the participants in a workshop, or museum visitors learn beyond the contents we have prepared for them? An example we always use to explain invisible pedagogies is the door. What is the meaning of closing a door in the classroom? And of leaving it open? Or asking the students which they prefer? In a museum the fact that the entrance doors are automatic or revolving or that one must push them, will send a specifically different message to the visitor and will affect the way he or she interacts with the art inside.
“Invisible pedagogies have many ways of changing people in their participation in the educative act. They help them to learn or not; they get people to become passionate for knowledge or deadly bored, they make them feel fear or pleasure, they invite them to share or to hide” (Acaso, 2012)
Invisible Pedagogies in Museums
We do not limit ourselves to making invisible pedagogies visible, but, once we have detected them, we analyze and transform them by applying them in new contexts and using new educational theories in different projects.
David Lanau, Andrea De Pascual, and Eva Morales (IP-Museums).
In the case of the three educators in the Invisisble Pedagogies (IP) collective that work in museums and art centers (Eva Morales, David Lanau and myself, Andrea De Pascual), rather than changing doors, we are offering whole new formats that expand the concept of education in museums. Little by little, museums and art centers are changing their attitudes and are opening their minds to new educative proposals which go beyond guided tours, audioguides, or workshops out of the exhibition spaces. However, the real opportunity for us came from Matadero Madrid.
As a contemporary art center, Matadero Madrid does not have an education department as such, but it does have great interest in educative aspects far beyond offering the heritage of the institution as an educational resource available for schools to complete their curriculums, or the simplification of the contents of curatorial work. This institution gave us the possibility to design our educative actions from an approach which Carmen Mörsch calls transformative discourse:
“Practices related to this discourse (transformative) work against the categorical or hierarchical differentiation between curatorial effort and gallery education. In this practice, gallery educators and the public not only work together to uncover institutional mechanisms, but also to improve and expand them” (Mörsch, 2009)
Working for Matadero Madrid helped us to visualize the (post)museum more as “a process or experience not a building to be visited. In it the role of the exhibition is to be focus for a plethora of transient activities” (Hooper-Greenhill, 2000). And it helped us see education as “an element of ongoing personal growth, that is not limited to one particular stage of life. Education as play, a way of unravelling the media theatre. Education as an open source operating system that turns us into critical citizens. Education as a game played by all individuals, from all eras. Education as a utopia for a culture-sharing society” (Zemos98, 2012).
These are just a few of our references that helps us to transform directionality, format, and methodology (among other aspects of traditional museum education) when designing our educational actions.
Transforming Invisible Pedagogies
I will present now some of the invisible pedagogies we have detected, analyzed, and transformed during the almost 5 years we have been working together, as well as issues and goals that are part of our methodological frame.
One of the most important discourses we want to change is the power-knowledge barrierbuilt between educators (visible voice of the institution during the praxis of museum education) and participants (individuals that in most cases feel they don’t have anything to say about contemporary art). In order to change this invisible directionality, we think that just sitting in a circle or introducing ourselves at the beginning of an activity (strategies that are already common practice) is not enough. One of our strategies to change that invisible pedagogy is to have always more than one educator per workshop. The idea is not only to decentralize people’s attention, so as not to have a single point of view, but also to show that among the “agents of the institution” there can be disagreements and even discords. It is a scheme to make the one true voice disappear in favor of a multiplicity of voices, all of them being equally valid. We also think that it was fundamental, in order to bring down this wall of conventional teaching, to introduce analytic dialogue (based on the possibility instead of the agreement) and open-ended activities receptive to the unexpected.
Contemporary art not only as content but also as a pedagogical format.
Another important invisible discourse we have to dismantle and transform is that Art and Education are two separate things. Art and Education are the two sides of the museum coin and should be approached at the same time. Just as art can be educative, education can be artistic. Why not use performance, installation, minimalism, video, body action. etc. as educative tools? We’re interested in the idea of using contemporary art not only as content of the program but also as a pedagogical format.
I think that nowadays we, museum educators, will in most cases agree that participants in our programs produce knowledge and add meaning to the exhibits but are we really honest? Are we prepared to believe it? What are we really telling our participants? If we want the museum to be a social agent and a place of action and transformation, we need to consider the participants in our actions as learning-communities capable of producing knowledge of the same quality, interest, and authenticity as the knowledge produced by artists and curators. To make this more than a statement, we never use a separate space in the museum (like a workshop reserved for education activities) and we find strategies through which participants and visitors can leave a footprint in the gallery or the museum. We mean to use the galleries, halls, atriums, or even the patios of museums as learning sites. We think of the museum as a learning laboratory in which new layers of knowledge are added to the pre-existing ones by the visualization of the knowledge production of the participants.
Last but not least, we introduce the action-research tool in museum education to change the invisible discourse that exists inside institutions around education departments. Although education departments in museums are now common and have their importance, the untold truth is that they still don’t have the resources or the tools needed to reach the status they deserve within the institution. Research is essential to change this dynamic. First, because the knowledge and research produced in museum education departments should be available to specialists; therefore archives are just as indispensable in education departments as in those of curatorship. Second, because in education there is no way of knowing how to improve the practice if you don’t analyze it.
IP Museum Projects at Matadero Madrid
Transforming the invisible pedagogies in the museum. Abierto X Obras, Matadero Madrid.
The first time IP worked with Matadero Madrid we developed a family workshop program that we called En Construcción. Disculpen las molestias (Under construction, sorry for the inconvenience) to activate a gallery dedicated to contemporary art called Abierto X Obras (Open for Repairs). IP transformed the family workshop format into intergenerational workshops, or, as we called them on that occasion, 0-99 workshops (from 0 to 99 years of age). The goal was to create a more inclusive format in which teenagers or babies could participate, or in which family was extended to include roommates, close friends, or even to allow adults (alone or accompanied with or without children) and to have them all participate in active way.
For our second project, we were invited to strengthen and activate the relationships between the audience and the art production that was taking place in El Ranchito— an exhibition that made visible the working processes of artists rather than the finished work. The project was called Espacio Visible (Visible Space), and it was literally a space inside the gallery available to educators and visitors to add meaning to the exhibition through their own contributions.
Our third project called Here, together now: Building art communities in a changing world, was a multi-national collaborative project to rethink how an art exhibition is produced, with and for whom. The three members of IP Museums were artists-educators in residence invited to create a scenario of mediation where the public could relate with what was being done.
In 2013 and 2014, we are developing the project Microondas: Recalentando la educación(Microwave: reheating the education) that consists of a collaborative-research and action group that rethinks current educational methodologies within new activist frameworks and theories. Our last seminar was called “Activist (?) Pedagogies”.
Opening the Conversation
Can you detect other invisible pedagogies in museum education? How would you transform them to change the dynamics of teaching in the museum? By incorporating invisible pedagogies in the practice of museum education, in what ways do you think they could expand the concept of education within the museum? Add your voice to the conversation below, or on Twitter with hashtag #invisiblepedagogies.
About the Author
ANDREA DE PASCUAL: A bilingual (Spanish-English) education specialist, artist, and researcher, Andrea is founding member of the collective Invisible Pedagogies and creator of the project The Rhizomatic Museum. She has worked for the past 8 years in a variety of museums, cultural institutions, and praxis collectives. Her work has focused on how the museum can be activated not only as a site for individualized contemplation, but also as a community-based site where knowledge is shared, and social, political and environmental issues are addressed. Andrea graduated from the Masters Program in Art Education at New York University in 2013 while on a Fulbright Fellowship, in connection with her Doctoral work as a candidate in Art Education in Museums at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Her dissertation is titled “Non Hierarchic Knowledge Production Strategies Within Western Visual Art Museums: The Rhizomatic Museum.” Andrea’s postings on this site are her own.
Submitted by Lydia Ross, Programmer of Education, School and Teacher Programs, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Re-published from NAEA Digication e-Portfolio site.
As 21st century art teachers there are so many competing pressures for time and attention that it can sometimes be difficult to focus on a core concern of creative teachers. How to gather innovative ideas for projects and curriculum that introduce students to a wide range of contemporary artmaking strategies?
“Recognizing the need to create opportunities for teachers to share innovative practice and understanding that old style curriculum sharing methods may not be the most efficient or engaging ways of exchanging quality curriculum, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago’s Educator Salon invented a fast-paced and fun format to share art projects—the Curriculum Slam!” explained Chicago art educator Olivia Gude.
“Today’s society of media saturation has given us all a touch of ADD. The curriculum slam format works well because it’s quick and entertaining and because the careful selection and preparation process guarantees that the content is fresh and well-thought out—based on significant contemporary ideas about making art.”
Inspired by the emceed hip hop-style poetry slams pioneered in Chicago in the 1980s that brought contemporary aesthetics and style to traditional poetry readings, the Curriculum Slam! re-invents the old-style curriculum fair by adapting a 21st century presentation innovation—the rapid style PechaKucha format. PechaKucha (in which 20 images are set to advance automatically every 20 seconds) was developed by the Klein Dytham architectural firm in Tokyo because there was a need for a public forum to share innovative work, but if you “Give a microphone and some images to …most creative people…and they’ll go on forever!”
The Curriculum Slam! has become a popular yearly feature of the MCA’s teacher programming since 2010. Teachers have presented on a wide range of topics—using the work of contemporary artists to inspire contemporary curriculum. Presentation subjects have ranged from 5th graders making paintings with the self-imposed limitations (based on the work of Matthew Barney), building and photographing miniature environments (in the style of artists such as Laurie Simmons and outsider artist Mark Hogancamp), humorous horror drawings (inspired by drawings and animation of Tim Burton) and explorations of self-identify in the digital age in which students’ text messages contribute to making self-representations.
“The Museum of Contemporary Art is a learning institution as well as a presenting institution. Through this project we are tapping into many forms of contemporary pedagogy. We are learning from teachers.” -Marissa Reyes, Associate Director of Education, School & Teacher Programs at the MCA
The PechaKucha format has been adapted to enhance curriculum sharing—“We have been using a 14-slides-in-40-seconds format to allow teachers the time to explain some of the details relating to core objectives, materials, choice of artists and other details that contribute to successful projects. We wanted to create a format that balanced being fun and sort of frantic with conveying useful content.”
Curriculum Slam! Goes to San Diego
Now, Chicago brings this dynamic presentation format to the country with the first ever NAEA National Conference Curriculum Slam! emceed by OMGude, Marissa Reyes and DJ Jamie Rees. The event will be held during the 2014 NAEA National Conference in San Diego (March 29-31, 2014) on Monday, March 31 from 4 to 5:50pm. NAEA Secondary Division Director, James Rees commented, “One thing teachers seem to be always looking for is timely content that matters to their students. This curriculum slam will model a dynamic method of communication, along with a dizzying array of meaningful curriculum. This will be a must attend event this year at the conference!”
How to Get Involved at the NAEA Curriculum Slam!
All members of the NAEA community are invited to apply to be a presenter in the San Diego conference Curriculum Slam! by sending in a short initial application explaining how the teacher’s curriculum unites great contemporary art and great contemporary curriculum, accompanied by a few images. The Museum of Contemporary Art Teacher Advisory Committee will review the applications, conduct phone interviews, choose participants and help presenters prepare for the fast-paced format.
See below for more information on the process of submitting an application by downloading the application forms and template for sample 3 slides in the presentation.
We’ll be in touch by within a few weeks of the December 18 deadline to let you know if you made the Slam! Team for 2014.
After you’ve been selected MCA staffer and Pecha Kucha coach Lydia Ross will “phone meet” with you to assist in making the most dynamic, inspiring and info-packed presentation possible.
Art Museum Teaching 