Boston
Introductory art-history and art-appreciationcourses, long a staple of liberal-arts education, are getting a new look.Participants in two sessions on Fridayat the annual meeting of the College Art Association said they aremoving away from just lecturing with slides in such courses to incorporating elements like studio work, small-group projects, and online discussion and review of images.
Susan Ball, the association’s executive director, said that pedagogy is an increasingly popular topic at the meeting. “People are waking up to the fact that they teach,” she said, “but that no one has told them how to teach.”
In a session on “Pedagogy for the 21st Century: Transforming the Art-History Survey and Art-Appreciation Courses,” Robert Bersson, a professor of art emeritus at James Madison University who still teaches as an adjunct there, recalled his own time as a 20th-century student in art-history courses at Brandeis University. He displayed the elaborate doodles on his notebooks and the list, in the margin of one page, of 16 women he wanted to date. More important, he said, the words in the notebooks demonstrate that “there’s absolutely no thinking going on -- I’m simply a recording machine.”
To counter that problem, professors outlined a variety of ways to get students out of lecture seats in darkened rooms. Gil Martin, an art instructor at Western Nevada Community College, said that he takes his art-history students outside to make paint brushes by pounding the ends of branches with rocks and has them make paint by mixing colored dirt and natural pigments with water. Those tasks, he said, prepare the students to understand Paleolithic cave art.
To help students comprehend Marcel Duchamp, the unconventional French-American artist, and his concept of “ready-made art,” Mr. Martin said he takes the students to Wal-Mart and has them choose objects that they feel “aesthetically neutral” about. The students pick the objects, such as a paper-towel holder or a spool of wire, give them titles, and then exhibit them in a gallery.
Finally, he said, the students discuss the concept of an artist’s choice as an aesthetic act, and enjoy watching the mystified reactions of other students who are not in the class. “They feel on the inside of the concept,” said Mr. Martin.
Sharon Tetly, also an instructor of art at Western Nevada Community College, said she started using more participatory methods in art-history classrooms by, for example, distributing roofing copper and a stylus for students to scratch it with, all the better to grasp Rembrandt’s etchings.
Such exercises, she said, help students understand the tools artists use and the artistic process. After she and other instructors began using such methods, she said, more students started majoring in art at the community college. She went on to have students build earthworks -- constructions out of rocks and dirt -- to help them comprehend the work of environmental artists like Christo whose work is site-specific. She said she tells students who worry that they are not creative to just relax and enjoy the process.
Debra M. Drexler, an associate professor of art at the University of Hawaii-Manoa, also said she has students try out some of the techniques that the artists they are studying used. Then, at the end of one of her courses, her teaching assistants illustrate the Dada movement, which emerged during World War I, with the sort of disruptive performance art that members of the movement often practiced. With no warning, her assistants might paint a mustache on her face or drive a motorcycle onto the podium. After a model lacking clothes did cartwheels onto the stage, Ms. Drexler introduced a no-nudity rule.
Molly Lindner, an assistant professor at Kent State University at Stark, has adapted a teaching method, known as problem-based learning, that is popular at many medical, business, and law schools.The method encourages students to work cooperatively in small groups on real problems. She said she eases students’ fears that their grades might suffer if other members of their group shirk the work, in part by promising to expel anyone who takes shirking to an extreme.
In a separate session at the meeting -- “Teaching Art History Online” -- art professors talked about teaching art history completely online and in hybrid courses that include classroom work. Two faculty members at the Fashion Institute of Technology, Beth Harris and Steven Zucker, told about “vodcasts,” a solution to the competition between text and images on a computer screen. The two teachers record audio explanations of the artworks that play while the students are looking at the images. Samples can be found at http://www.smarthistory.blogspot.com/
A cautionary note on the online teaching of art history was sounded by Geoffrey Simmins of the University of Calgary, in a talk titled “If You Build It, They May Not Come.” Mr. Simmins said that, in online teaching, it is tempting to pile a long series of images on students. And when he asked students how they would like to be tested, he got a surprising answer: with old-fashioned slides.
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