Calling All Art History Teachers!

Maggie M. Williams
October 1, 2018

Well, it’s already October, and the fall semester is in full swing! If you’re like me, you wrote your syllabi a while back and you felt more-or-less prepared on Day 1.

Then, when you met the actual humans in your class, you immediately began to see all the flaws in the document—and the course—that you had developed entirely within your own mind, or maybe while reading it aloud to your cat. Now, you’re making edits on the fly—week by week, class by class. It’s hectic and frustrating, but it’s the nature of teaching, the give and take between your idea of what should be and the reality of real people learning and interacting in your classroom space.

We’ve been thinking a lot about how we teach lately, and we’re launching a new experiment for the blog this term. Below, you will see a CFP for guest posts on pedagogy. Please send us (and our readers) your ideas!!

The 10 of us in the Core Committee will read submissions and select as many as we can accommodate to post. We’re planning to run this throughout the fall, and beyond if we get enough material. We hope you’ll participate and we’re looking forward to your submissions.

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CFP for Blog Posts: Teaching Art History

by Shannon Gilmore

In recent years, educators have encountered new changes within the classroom. More and more universities are adopting curricula that include Global Art History courses, and today’s classroom is inundated with technological tools, including iPads, interactive projectors, social media, and virtual field trips, all of which offer educators endless possibilities as well as challenges. How might we best harness these new methodologies and tools? What are some of their pitfalls and how might we grapple with these?

Despite the advent of such changes, certain traditional practices continue within the discipline. Students still consume time memorizing bare-boned facts to ace the slide identification sections of exams and many survey courses overwhelmingly focus on the canon. Through this blog, we hope to shake up the art-history classroom by exploring new ways to encourage students to critically and actively approach course material and by incorporating interdisciplinary methodology to complicate students’ understanding of art history.

We welcome blog posts from anyone with secondary (9-12) or university-level teaching experience (i.e., teaching assistants, lecturers, or professors). At the Material Collective, we are dedicated to increasing public access to knowledge and we therefore welcome posts dealing not only with undergraduate teaching but also with pedagogical techniques employed in outreach programs.

Possible topics may include but are not limited to:

  • Technology and the digital humanities in the classroom
  • Making the Middle Ages relevant to today’s students
  • Innovative syllabi
  • Rethinking the survey course
  • Teaching Global Art History
  • Reframing assignments and class assessments
  • Ways to foster an inclusive environment within the classroom
  • Successful in-class activities
  • Learning art history through the artistic process

Please send abstracts of no more than 500 words to: sgilmore@umail.ucsb.edu.