“Man Watering High Flower Pots”

Mid-terms are over for another semester and I just finished a round of grading essays (something that I actually enjoy doing). As usual, they run the gamut from outstanding and humorous to the lackluster….

I teach the history of art and visual culture, which I often describe as learning about history and ideas in pictures. At the beginning of the semester, I passed out a series of 10 short questions to gauge the existing knowledge level of my students whom I knew had never taken any kind of art history before. The most important question for me was the last: ‘This class is an elective. Why did you choose it over the other options available to you?’ My primary goal in asking this was to uncover the reasoning behind their choice so that I could develop strategies for delivering the content of the course in ways that would potentially be more meaningful to this group of students.

As I suspected, many selected this class because it fit into their schedule, or they thought the content sounded somewhat interesting. However, I also received a response that made me excited – “I’m taking this class because when I go into museums or galleries I always see people spending lots of time looking at things and I always wonder what it is they’re looking at.” In essence, this student’s motivation for enrolling in the course was to increase his visual literacy by learning how to decode and read images.

The kinds of survey courses I teach have traditionally been structured upon rote memorization and the subsequent regurgitation of specific pieces of information. Yes, there are fundamental learning objectives that need to be achieved; however, I also want my students to develop their own visually critical toolboxes, which to me entails having them apply the knowledge that they’ve learned to new and unfamiliar situations (or in this particular case – works of art or visual culture). What this ability to apply knowledge demonstrates is a grasping of the broad, underlying concepts that influence or shape the way an object appears. The idea is that the skills they develop will (hopefully) transfer to real-life encounters beyond the pages of a textbook and the walls of the classroom.

As those who have taken any course of any kind can attest, one of the biggest drawbacks to a survey class is its breadth that comes at the sacrifice of depth. Most works are only covered in a superficial manner, which can make developing that critical toolbox tricky. In addition, keeping students engaged for a three hour long night class (as I have been charged with doing) is its own special kind of challenge.

Yet the in-class discussions and the compare and contrasts we’ve been doing appear to be paying off in terms of increasing visual literacy. So much so, that the “never seen before” sculpture included in the mid-term was one of the best answered questions on the exam. Just like all the other slide identifications, they had to name the work, sculptor and producing culture. The difference was that they had to provide evidence that supported their answer.

“Man Watering High Flower Pots” – Praxiteles

To me, reading their answers was exhilarating. (Yes, I realize how much that might make it sound like I need more excitement in my life – which is not true – I think it just makes me a hard-core educator at heart!) I suspect that part of the reason for the success on this question has to do with what the students had to do when presented with an unfamiliar image. They had to look. Instead of briefly glancing at the image to see what it was before turning back to the page, heads down, while trying to recall all the minutiae of whatever work was on the screen, they actually had to look at the work they were writing about and think about it in an active way. Fueled by the mini chocolate bars passed out before the exams, they had to think about what other works had they seen before which were similar or different, and how? Which aspects of the work offered clues as to which culture produced it, and why?

Across the board, their analyses of the work illustrated that they have begun internalizing the grand narratives set out in the course. As someone passionate about the ways viewers create meaning when engaging with visual culture, especially those inexperienced in the language of visual culture, this is a major coup. My next hope is that since their exams are non-cumulative, they retain at least some of the content they learned in the first half of the semester…

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