Author: slitvin2016

Statue of Liberty Class-as-Curator

slitvin2016

Lesson Name: Statue of Liberty Class-as-Curator Workshop

Primary Museum Pedagogy: Putting it All Together, Physicality, Narrativity, Materiality

Course Title and Description: Museum Pedagogy in the Classroom Workshop, Teaching and Learning Center, CUNY

Lesson Overview: This lesson plan was developed for a workshop at the Teaching and Learning Center at the CUNY Graduate Center in February, 2018. It combines the pedagogies of physicality, narrativity, and materiality to create a classroom-based curatorial process.
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Materiality

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Objects are central to museum interpretation, but seldom considered in the college classroom. Methods such as close looking, handling objects, and rummaging can help professors to be what Elizabeth Latham calls “object advocates” who “not only reveal many more layers of information, but will also provide opportunities…to project their own experiences onto objects,” and thereby connect with students at the material, personal, and socio-cultural levels.

Classroom Applications

Close Looking is a method that often applies visual thinking strategies to ask students to carefully observe one particular image or artifact for a given period.

Handling objects are passed around in class and offer many of the benefits of multi-sensory learning, including opportunities to identify and share cultural beliefs, ideas, and emotional responses.

Rummaging invites participants to “browse omnivorously” through a variety of objects or images.

Further Reading

  • Chatterjee, Dr Helen J., and Dr Leonie Hannan, Engaging the Senses: Object-Based Learning in Higher Education. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2015.
  • Milkova, Liliana, and Steve Volk, “Crossing the Street; Pedagogy: Using College Art Museums to Leverage Significant Learning Across the Campus.” In A Handbook for Academic Museums: Exhibitions and Education, edited by Jandl Stefanie S. and Mark S. Gold, 88–118. Edinburgh, UK and Cambridge, MA: MuseumsEtc, 2012. https://www.academia.edu/10963073/Crossing_the_Street_Pedagogy_Using_College_Art_Museums_to_Leverage_Significant_Learning_Across_the_Campus.
  • Wood, Elizabeth, and Kiersten F. Latham, The Objects of Experience: Transforming Visitor-Object Encounters in Museums. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2013.
  • Woodall, Alexandria, “Rummaging as a Strategy for Creative Thinking and Imaginitive Engagement in Higher Education” in Helen J. Chatterjee and Leonie Hannan, Engaging the Senses: Object-Based Learning in Higher Education (New York: Routledge, 2016)

References

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Museum Pedagogy References

Physicality

  • Grenier, R. S., “All Work and No Play Makes for a Dull Museum Visitor.” New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, (2010): 77–85.
  • Jensen, Eric, Teaching with the Brain in Mind. Assn for Supervision & Curriculum: Alexandria. 2005.
  • Lanser, Susan Sniader, “The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction”
  • Shoval, Ella and Boaz Shulruf, “Who Benefits From Cognitive Learning With Movement Activity?” School Psychology International (2011), 68.

Materiality

  • Chatterjee, Dr Helen J., and Dr Leonie Hannan, Engaging the Senses: Object-Based Learning in Higher Education. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2015.
  • Milkova, Liliana, and Steve Volk, “Crossing the Street; Pedagogy: Using College Art Museums to Leverage Significant Learning Across the Campus.” In A Handbook for Academic Museums: Exhibitions and Education, edited by Jandl Stefanie S. and Mark S. Gold, 88–118. Edinburgh, UK and Cambridge, MA: MuseumsEtc, 2012. https://www.academia.edu/10963073/Crossing_the_Street_Pedagogy_Using_College_Art_Museums_to_Leverage_Significant_Learning_Across_the_Campus.
  • Wood, Elizabeth, and Kiersten F. Latham, The Objects of Experience: Transforming Visitor-Object Encounters in Museums. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2013.
  • Woodall, Alexandria, “Rummaging as a Strategy for Creative Thinking and Imaginitive Engagement in Higher Education” in Helen J. Chatterjee and Leonie Hannan, Engaging the Senses: Object-Based Learning in Higher Education (New York: Routledge, 2016)

Storytelling and Narrativity

  • Abrahamson, Craig Eilert, “Storytelling as a Pedagogical Tool in Higher Education.” Education 118, no. 3. (Spring 1998.)
  • Bedford, Leslie, “Storytelling: The Real Work of Museums.” Curator 44, no. 1 (January 2001): 27–https://www.academia.edu/11058356/Storytelling_The_Real_Work_of_Museums.
  • Combs, Martha and John D. Beach, “Stories and Storytelling: Personalizing the Social Studies.” The Reading Teacher  47, no. 6 (March 1994): 464-471.
  • Lanser, Susan Sniader, The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.

Class As Curator

  • Bedford, Leslie, The Art of Museum Exhibitions: How Story and Imagination Create Aesthetic Experiences. Walnut Creek, California: Left Coast Press, 2014.
  • Felicia, Patrick. Handbook of Research on Improving Learning and Motivation through Educational Games: Multidisciplinary Approaches. IGI Global, 2011.

 

 

 

Letter to Bialystok Assignment

slitvin2016

Lesson Name: Letter to Bialystok Assignment

Primary Museum Pedagogy: Narrativity

Course Title and Description: History 208, Exploring Global History, Theme: New York Immigration and the Modern World

  • “This course will introduce students to global history by exploring a particular theme or issue in its historical context. Sections will address a given topic in detail and consider its global legacy.”

Lesson Overview: This lesson asks students to put themselves in the shoes of a teenager who recently immigrated from the city of Bialystok, Poland to either Argentina or Palestine, and is writing a letter home to a friend back in Bialystok about their new life. The homework leading up to this in-class assignment is to answer a series of directed questions based on chapter 2 of Rebecca Kobrin’s Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora. The answers to those questions give the information that students are now asked to apply to imagining a first-person narrative.

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Immigration Stories Assignment

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Lesson Name: Immigration Stories Assignment

Primary Museum Pedagogy: Materiality and Narrativity

Course Title and Description: John Jay College history 208 (World History Lecture Course)

Lesson Overview:  In this lesson, students compose and revise short “object biographies” to submit to the growing digital archive “Your Story, Our Story,” which is a project of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.

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