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