Museum as Classroom

Hello Teaching World! I am Alex, a 6th-year PhD candidate in the History of Art Department and a YTC Fellow. Today I'd like to tell you a little about teaching with art and, for those of you teaching in or around Yale, the wonderful Yale University Art Gallery, which reopens on Wednesday, December 12th.

Contrary to popular belief, museums are not scary places. Nor are they the private domain of experts, aficionados, and elites. No way! They are for the people, especially the free-of-charge YUAG, which has been from its inception a teaching institution. Better still, the museum has just undergone a substantial renovation and re-installation, nearly tripling its previous size. 

Even if you aren't teaching art history, a museum has much to offer many disciplines from Medicine to Japanese, especially the temporally- and geographically-extensive YUAG. The education department would be happy to help you select material and arrange a visit (contact David.Odo@yale.edu for more info). The objects you select could be similar to your discipline's subject (e.g. medical students looking at medical images) or similar to its methodology (e.g. anthropology students analyzing museum visitors' interaction with art objects.)

In this post, I will focus on the pedagogical benefits of close-looking at art objects.  The cornerstone of art historical methodology is visual analysis -- a close-looking of an object to build an interpretation. Formal analysis is analogous to "close-reading" in literature, but through parsing visual details rather than textual. The benefit of having a real, live art object is that you can look really, REALLY, REALLY closely -- sometimes even with a magnifying glass! This ability allows you (and your students) to more thoroughly understand the artist's choices, the life of the artwork, the chemical basis of the materials, and much more.

The first and foremost pedagogical benefit of a museum visit is how it can add variety to your teaching style. For most, getting out of the classroom is an invigorating experience that can inject any class with new breath. Additionally, a visit will activate  learning styles (VARK) sometimes lost in the classroom -- kinesthetic and visual -- through the sheer physicality of being in a museum and, of course, the visual material. Furthermore, you can use the museum  outside of classroom time, assigning short papers or presentations based on student research and/or observation.

Second, developing critical thinking through close-looking can aid in a student's overall intellectual development. It can make students more cognizant of their visual surroundings -- prompting them to question the images that bombard us daily, ranging from iPhone apps to CNN to fast-food ads. In the classroom, visual analysis provides an analogous method of critical thinking, which students may apply to other disciplines and contexts. The process of building an interpertation based on careful observation can also aid in the development of expository writing or even diagnosis.
 

Alongside this post I have a attached some Instagram photos I snapped at the YUAG last week. With these photos as an example, I would like to suggest a museum activity that you can use with your students, in a class or as an assignment:
1) Tell the students to bring a smartphone to photograph object(s) of their choosing.  
2) Have them also select frames and filters for their images. (Most young folk are very familiar with these photo-editing apps like Instgram, Picfx, or even Facebook).  
3) Depending on your class's subject matter, add a theoretical framework through which they should make these choices. This could be gender, spirituality, historical events, chemistry, physics, post-structuralism -- you name it! 
4) Then have the students present their photos and why they chose the object, composition, frame, and lens with regard to the theoretical framework. 
5) Commence fruitful discussion!

Thanks for listening! I hope you all get a chance to see the new YUAG soon! 

Images:
1. Central Stairway, Yale University Art Gallery, Louis Kahn Building, 1953
2. Benedetto Bonfigli, Christ the Redeemer, ca. 1455–1460  
3. Fukami Sueharu, View of Distant Sea II, ca. 1985 
4. Portrait of a Man, c. 300 A.D., and Portrait of a Young Man, 140-160 A.D., Ancient Rome (in far background: Joseph Wright, Portrait of Mr. William Chase, Sr., ca. 1760-6)
5. Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing #786A, 1995
 

Storifying Lectures

Lectures can sometimes be bland, unimaginative, and dare I say, boring. You know what isn't boring? Stories. Why can't lectures be more like stories? I'm Alp, a PhD Candidate in Biomedical Engineering, and I'm writing this week about "storifying" lectures.

Everyone must have experienced that rare moment of humanity when an instructor shares a comical anecdote. (My favorite was a tree falling into my instructor's living room and his deadpan reaction of "well, that's bad.") Injecting short stories into your lectures is never a bad idea, but this post is not about that. This post is about taking elements of stories that make them memorable and applying them to lectures. So what makes a story... well, good?

This is a big question. One proposal that seems convincing is Joseph Campbell's monomyth framework.¹ Campbell posits that many narratives from around the world exhibit a basic outline of a hero's journey from a (known) stable world, to an (unknown) suspenseful realm, and back again. Think of the Lord of the Rings books or the original Star Wars movies as a modern example.

So can we, as lecture designers, use any of this? I say, sure! In our case, the student is the hero/ine who steps from the known world (understanding) to the unknown world (new concepts). The journey (lecture/course) brings her back to the known world through the guidance of a mentor (the instructor) and helpers (teaching assistants). So what are some concrete tips we can draw from this parallelism? Let me propose two:

1. Call to Adventure: Think of a bad movie you saw recently. I'm willing to bet you that the reason you didn't like it is because you didn't relate to and/or understand the problem. Same thing with lectures. Students who can't immediately see why they are studying what they are studying will be less likely to pay attention. What to do? Try to precisely motivate the challenge to be tackled in the lecture at the very beginning. Convince your students that the story you're about to tell them matters. Not just to the world, but that it matters to them. This (image) is what you're going for, right off the bat.
2. Suspense in the Unknown World: Suspense is a great narrative tool. It presents an irresistible incentive to pay attention. The audience feels invested in the problem. Well, guess what? The "unknown world" of lectures if full of problems! So use suspense to draw the students in. Separate the description of your examples from their solutions. Instead of first lecturing on a topic and then following up with examples, state the example first but don't solve it just yet. Get your students to think about it. (How about a short "think-pair-share" exercise or a clicker question?) This creates tension as students realize that they need more knowledge to solve the problem. Now lecture for a bit to develop the necessary knowledge base, and finally solve the example to conclude the suspense. Same material, same time, but so much more exciting!

None of this is pedagogical science; I make no claims about the effectiveness of such approaches. But, the art of storytelling is a product of thousands of years of human curiosity, ingenuity, and dedication. Everyone knows a good story when they hear one... and some even remember them well enough to pass them on. Isn't that one of the goals of lecturing? Seems silly not to tap into such a rich resource for inspiration. See what storytelling tips you can come up with! (Share them in the comments below!)

References
¹Campbell, Joseph. "The Hero with a Thousand Faces." (1949).