Art History Survey: A Round-Table Discussion
Author(s): Peggy Phelan, Kevin Concannon, Irina D. Costache, Kathleen Desmond, David
Little and Steve Shipps
Source: Art Journal , Summer, 2005, Vol. 64, No. 2 (Summer, 2005), pp. 32-51
Published by: CAA
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20068381
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
CAA is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Art Journal
This content downloaded from
178.22.113.86 on Sun, 14 Mar 2021 22:46:00 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Michael Delacroix. Melting Pot, 1998.
Installation views and details, Getty
Center, Los Angeles, 1998. Photographs:
Susan M?ddleton,?The J. Paul Getty Trust.
All rights reserved.
This content downloaded from
178.22.113.86 on Sun, 14 Mar 2021 22:46:00 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
At the College Art Association 2003 annual conference, the editorial board of Art Journal convened
a round-table discussion on the art history survey: why it continues to exist, who teaches it and how is
it taught, and what have been effective challenges and innovations to its traditional form. Participants
engaged in a spirited, substantive, and inconclusive discussion. Organizer and moderator Peggy Phelan
(then chair of the Art Journal editorial board) proposed that this conversation on pedagogy should
continue. She convened a round-table discussion, via e-mail, on the survey course with several experi
enced teachers and scholars. During the course of the conversation,
Peggy Phelan, Kevin Concannon, K?thJeen Desmon? noted, "The Carnegie Foundation found that
Irina D. Costache, Kathleen Desmond, g0 percent 0f coueae teaching faculty listed teaching as their primary
David Little, and Steve Shipps interest.Yet we barely discuss teaching. Treating teaching in the same
m . U . a ways we treat research and art making can revitalize and legitimize the
^^' * ^ * ** '/ ^UI VCJf? essential component of our jobs as college professors." With these points
a Round-Table Discussion inmind>wearepublishingexcerptsfrom thee~maiIdiscussion'h?Pin0
it might provoke further consideration of and dialogue about teaching
the arts and art history in the new century.
Peggy Phelan: I have been intrigued by the persistence of the survey course as
a staple of art history programs, despite extremely radical transformations in the
ideological and methodological foundations of the field, transformations in the
skills and demographics of college students, and profound revisions in the cur
ricula of PhD programs in art history. Given these changes, it would seem logical
that the survey would become an obsolete, archaic technology in a postmodern
world. I know it is cost-effective for universities to offer these large courses, but
I think there is more than money behind the survey's persistence. Many students
love to take survey courses, and many people love to teach them. Have you
observed this? If so, to what do you attribute this? And if this is not your sense
of things, I would like to hear your thoughts about successful alternatives or
replacements for the survey.
The Survey
David Little: I agree with Peggy that many students are hungry for the survey.
They want a body of knowledge and desire facts, landmarks, and themes to hold
together the complex histories of artistic practices, institutions, and aesthetics.
They seem to say, just give me one history for now and then I will adjust it,
reject it, destroy it. I think of the survey as a rough framework that helps stu
dents begin to think about a theme, period, movement, subject, and so on, but
I always remind them of the biases that help to construct the history presented
and that the selected content discussed is always, in some sense, contingent. Even
though it is often unfashionable to teach chronologically, I maintain this format
to help students maintain a sense of context and history. From the few, key time
posts that I give students, I encourage them to develop their own. Most of the
students I have taught, however, do not have a sense of the historical trajectory
of the twentieth century, and by this I do not mean linear trajectory. I mean sim
ple historic facts, such as Dada emerged during World War I, Surrealism between
the wars, and Freud wrote over a hundred years before Oprah and Dr. Phil came
to television.
33 art journal
The visual essay that accompanies this article rep
resents the work of several contemporary artists
engaged in complex issues surrounding the notion
of art history. While this selection is in no way
comprehensive, it articulates the varied ways in
which art history (as well as those who create it,
destroy it, maintain it, and alter it) continues to
provide controversial subject matter in current art
practices. The images were selected by Amy
Papaelias.
This content downloaded from
178.22.113.86 on Sun, 14 Mar 2021 22:46:00 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Steve Shipps: I should stress that I don't teach survey, per se. At Emerson, Visual
Arts ioi is an "appreciation" course with a historical component, but no more
than that. At least half of the eighty students per term who take it expect that it
will be a survey of art history, and for most of the students the clear assumption
is that to know about "art" is to know about "art history," and vice versa. The
other students seem about equally divided between those who do know and care
some about art and art history, and those who neither know nor care, nor care
to know, about either (those dragged kicking and screaming to the course by
distribution requirements). Save for these latter few, though, I take it that Peggy's
sense that "many students love to take survey courses" is justified ... at least,
before the fact.
A few years ago, the Education Committee sponsored an open session at
the CAA conference, entitled "What Do First-Year College Students Know about
Art, Anyway?" We asked attendees to comment on any gaps or deficiencies they
typically found in their first-year students' preparation for college art courses.
Virtually every person who spoke verified what I had long suspected. They said
that their students had no real sense of what artists did that was any different
from what anybody else did, and/or they said that their students had no real
idea of what relevance art had to their lives.
In my experience, whether or not undergraduates in introductory courses
are aware of those perceived "deficiencies" in themselves when they enter such
courses, by the time the discussion moves much beyond, say, the Impressionists,
those gaps, unless they've been clearly addressed en route, tend to manifest in
varying states of bewilderment, often unto outrage: "How could this be art? And
what could it have to do with me?" And if that happens, of course, a lot fewer
are pleased to have taken the course by the time it's over than loved it when
they arrived.
So survey courses like the two that I took in the mid- 1960s?which assume
that art is self-evidently worthwhile and therefore so is its history?are, I think,
obsolete anachronisms, if only pragmatically. Though surely a lot of them still
exist, unreconstructed, taught perhaps by junior faculty who have "higher"
scholarly aspirations and often don't love doing so. But my sense and hope is
that those surveys that everybody does love, at both ends, are likely not like the
traditional ones, in that to one degree or another, they actively confront student
"deficiencies" and the radical shifts in the field, and deal with them directly in
the context of the course.
Irina D. Costache: The challenge of the survey courses has to do with the
enormous amount of information students (most of the time with no art or
art history background) are exposed to in a short period of time. Moreover, the
survey and those teaching it truly define what is and what is not art. Therefore,
this course, its content and methodologies, is important not only to education,
but also to the future of the arts. Yet these crucial elements are often ignored in
the academic environment. Being a lower-division course, the survey has a cer
tain stigma, and few senior faculty are interested in teaching it. Some schools
have even deleted the survey from the curriculum.
A fundamental objective of the survey is to make its content interesting
and meaningful for a twenty-first-century audience. Therefore in my lectures,
34 SUMMER 2005
This content downloaded from
178.22.113.86 on Sun, 14 Mar 2021 22:46:00 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Elaine Reichek. Gallery of the Louvre, 2004.
Embroidery on linen. 38lA x SO'A in. (97.8 x
128.3 cm). Courtesy of Nicole Klagsbrun
Gallery, New York.
presentations, discussions, and assignments, I keep a chronological narrative,
but establish relevant connections between the present and past through cross
chronological and cross-cultural examples. These comparisons introduce works
of art from traditions and time periods not studied in the specific course, as
well as images from popular culture and other "non-survey sources." This is not
intended to dismiss familiar landmarks, but rather to expose the mechanisms
through which art historians and the culture in general define aesthetic and
artistic values. This approach provides students not only with a list of master
pieces, but also with the tools that allow them to evaluate and develop critical
ways of looking and thinking about art. These strategies and other approaches,
which some of you talked about, transform art and its history into a lively topic
with meaningful implications for students. I now start the survey with an analy
sis of the field of art history. This introduction demystifies (a little bit) art and
its history. Many students are intimidated by art and its interpretation.
Kathleen Desmond: As an art educator with thirty years of college art teaching
experience, I most often teach using "group processing" (a 1980s term), now called
"active learning." I am held in disdain by traditional art historians for not using
two stuffed slide projectors in my classes and for ignoring compare-and-contrast
3 5 art journal
This content downloaded from
178.22.113.86 on Sun, 14 Mar 2021 22:46:00 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
methodology and questions about names, chronology, and style on exams. I don't
find any of this as important as students' remembering the "big ideas." And I
want them to make these big ideas, this knowledge, their own.
When students found out that I used active learning teaching strategies, they
begged to be in my class. They felt they didn't learn in the traditional art history
survey class. Some colleagues chalked this up to my course being "easier." No
Scantron tests, lots of group work, and the development of a community of art
learners in classes of fifty to a hundred students. Requirements include two
papers, two sets of drawings, oral and written class work, along with a required
trip (and paper) to one of the two art museums in Kansas City. Visiting an art
museum is a first in the lives of many of our first-generation college students.
Some students ask what they should wear and if they are allowed to talk in the
museum, indicating why they have not visited an art museum before. We take
a lot for granted as art professors, and we need to try to remember what is was
like before we devoted our lives to the study of art.
Many professors who teach the survey course teach the way they learned,
with no consideration for the fact that students learn differently these days than
they did. Some professors are also dedicated to the "canon" and cannot figure
out how to get that canon taught if not by lecture?the way they learned. But
the National Training Lab in Bethel, Maine, shows that the lecture method of
teaching produces the lowest learner retention rate. When students are involved
in teaching others, there is a 90 percent retention rate, practice by doing has a
75 percent retention rate, and discussion groups a so percent rate.
Shipps: Like Kathy, I understood Peggy's kick-off message to suggest that tradi
tional surveys remain a staple of art history programs. She doesn't use the term,
of course, and so perhaps Kathy and I are mistaken, but the context does seem to
imply the "traditional" part. And insofar as that was Peggy's intent, then, obvi
ously, Kathy's experience and my own suggest otherwise.
But where Kathy's emphasis is on the kinds of nontraditional ("nonlecture")
teaching that optimally takes place in surveys today, mine is on content. My idea
is that for any survey to be meaningful today, it must necessarily spend at least a
little time presenting and discussing aesthetic theory.
My contention has long been that the subject matter of surveys is too vast
and too complex to cover adequately in fourteen weeks, much less to cover in
a way that leaves time for reflection unto conceptualization. Well, fine, you may
say, then the epiphany can come later, even much later . . . but in my experience,
most disinterested sophomores, operating without any working conceptual/
theoretical grasp of what "art" is or why they're bothering with it, and faced
with art based, to one degree or another, just in concept and theory (anything
from, say, 18^0 on), give up. And if they leave their surveys having given up, con
ceptually/theoretically, on the whole art enterprise (or even just the last couple
of centuries of it), there's precious little in Western (ized) culture today to make
them come back to art later.
All of which leads me to propose that today, to succeed, surveys must offer
some considered, working theory, up front, about how students might think
about what "art" means now and what it has meant in the past, what it might
be, and why it's important. (And it needs to refer back to those working ideas
36 SUMMER 200?
This content downloaded from
178.22.113.86 on Sun, 14 Mar 2021 22:46:00 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
and theories, throughout.) Without such (nontraditional) input, we risk losing
many of our students even before their survey is over.
This beginning is useful not just because there's a lot of theorizing in the
arts lately, and so it ought to be acknowledged, as content. More fundamentally,
I want to offer my students a way to think about art, a framework for sorting?
meaningfully?the information we provide. I want them to understand art (as
opposed to just knowing about it).They need that not only because art is so
complex lately, but also because it's so removed from most of their experience,
so marginalized in their culture .. . and because all these things together make
for a subject matter that most of today's students are not developmentally pre
pared to grasp. Any number of studies have shown that the vast majority of
undergraduates today are still operating at what Piaget called the "concrete oper
ational" level. (How much this may or may not have to do with the dumbing
down of American culture remains moot, as far as I know.)
The Mythical Survey
Phelan: It might be that we have this conceptual term "the survey course" that
functions as a sort of ghost in the imagination of art history?the almighty pro
fessor holding forth on the same works with the same notes and the same slides
in some kind of time-out-of-mind performance?but who, in the reality of our
teaching and learning lives, never actually appears. Or if the ghost does appear, it
does not take the form it holds in the field's imagination of it?an imagination
we also share, even while we declare ourselves "other" to it.
Little: It's easy to treat the mythical, monolithic survey as the bad mother who
doesn't raise her kids as well as we do, or as a past technology that is not as
advanced as ours. I think it is a leap to assume that we all had the same survey
and memorized the same slides generations ago, and that we did not learn some
thing from the survey that is used today in new pedagogical approaches and
selections of content. But if it were not for the grounding in something, flaws
and all, that I had in what we might call a more traditional approach to art his
tory (even this term traditional is problematic because there is a new kind of
redundancy and tradition in art history today?Duchamp's urinal, the ready
made ad infinitum, Olympia, etc.), I do not believe that I would have compre
hended the depths of deconstruction. (My education moved from traditional
art history, to museum studies, to intensive critical theory.) All of the great con
temporary critical thinkers (Derrida, Jameson, Foucault, Said, to name some
favorites) are also well-trained classicists who draw upon a vast knowledge and
understanding of the canon (Plato, Hegel, Marx, etc.) in their fields. Sure, I
believe that students need to learn to think critically about customs, traditions,
and ideology, but they need to have something to think critically about.
Textbooks
Shipps: When I speak of "traditional" surveys, I mean ones like those I took
way, way back when: darkness-at-noon art history surveys, uncontextualized and
(supposedly) self-justifying, two slides at a time, usually formally based, using
37 art journal
This content downloaded from
178.22.113.86 on Sun, 14 Mar 2021 22:46:00 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
38 SUMMER 2005
This content downloaded from
178.22.113.86 on Sun, 14 Mar 2021 22:46:00 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Hiroshi Sugimoto. Queen Elizabeth I, 1999.
Black-and-white photograph. 40 x 30 in.
( 101.6 x 76.2 cm). Courtesy of Sonnabend
Gallery.
Janson or Gardner. For the exam, know who made what, where, and when, and
be able to do a little formal analysis. You might be right, Peggy, that such courses
have become the stuff of legend and myth, that nobody does it that way any
more. But, if it's any sort of index, the people who write the textbooks used in
surveys today clearly don't think so?and presumably, they're responding to
market demand (or perhaps they're responding to market demand as publishers
describe it, which, given publishers' notorious conservatism, may be a different
thing . . . but I think that, in fact, it's both). In any event, in graduate school fif
teen years ago, I wrote a fifty-page qualifying paper as a preliminary to my the
sis. I did a close read of the most-used college introductory texts at the time (I
surveyed a carefully structured representative sample of fifty college programs, to
determine which texts these were). Long story short, both Janson and Gardner?
far and away the most-used history texts?did not address at all any of the
increasingly thorny issues of definition, of category, of "lines," etc., attending
art at the time. Janson just ignored them. The Gardner book explicitly refused to
have anything to do with them. Nor did the appreciation texts do much better,
though they typically did ask "What is art?" right off the bat, and in attempting
to answer that question, they offered the sort of cosmic generalities and vast
elliptical vagaries that many students have accordingly come to think of?and
sneer at?as "artspeak." In my view, Preble's Artforms, back then, did better at
defining art than most; McCarter and Gilbert's Living with Art, worse . . . but
nobody did it very well.
I don't think a lot has changed, with one notable exception on that score,
in such textbooks today. Anthony Janson has gotten as explicit about not dealing
with questions of context and relevance as his father and his competitors used
to be. A quick scan of Stokstad suggests to me that she's in essentially the same
place. Among the current appreciation books, I'm aware of only one that grap
ples with current issues (now, vastly more crucial to understanding art than they
were in 1988.) That's the current [2004] edition of Living with Art, by Mark Getlein
(I know of this because, ironically, both Kathy Desmond and I were asked to
contribute essays to its teachers' manual?to precisely the manual that seems to
need them least). Anyway, when I did get to my thesis work thirteen years ago,
I compared levels of meaningful learning about art in a by-the-(text)book, tradi
tional introduction to visual art, with those in a course that was exactly the same
except for the insertion, early on, of two lectures about aesthetic theory. The results
were remarkable, even to me (who'd expected they'd be there)?the kids in that
"intervention" course, who'd had their (latent?) issues and questions about "art"
brought out in the open and addressed, left it having learned vastly more mean
ingfully than had their peers in the other, traditional section. It seems to me that
such an intervention has become all the more critical to effective teaching about
art, in the po-mo years since.
Phelan: It seems clear that no one here is in favor of upholding the traditional
notion of how the survey is /was taught. If that notion of teaching the survey
is now well and truly gone (or certainly on its way out), what functions in its
place? What are the pleasures and achievements of the survey course (large his
torical sweep, large audiences, large range of artworks) that we want to hold
onto even while we change the style, content, and purposes of this course?
39 art journal
This content downloaded from
178.22.113.86 on Sun, 14 Mar 2021 22:46:00 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Audience
Desmond: To begin a discussion of teaching, it is imperative to define audi
ence?our contemporary students?and to try to figure out how they learn.
Students are different in community colleges, regional comprehensive universi
ties, research universities, private colleges, and art schools, and in their intent in
studying there.
We want to study the level of cognitive development of our students, e.g.,
theories like those of William Perry, who developed a model of adult cognitive
development from concrete (which is where most college age students are) to
abstract (which is where we are). Concrete thinkers are not comfortable with
ambiguity. They want to know the right or wrong answer. They are not critical
thinkers . . . yet. It is our job to get them there. It is our job to teach students to
think critically and to write and to research.
It is necessary to define the objectives of the course, selecting specific con
cepts to be learned. Teaching strategies are tied to these objectives and concepts.
Finally, we evaluate what students have learned and assess how well we met our
objectives. Put another way, how can we teach students about the content (objec
tives) in the given time frame (three or sixteen weeks) in a way that meets their
learning needs (teaching strategies), and how do we know they learned what we
set out for them to learn (assessment) ?
Little: I have always found it a challenge adjusting to different groups of stu
dents: ESL, continuing-education students, artists, museum audiences, etc. But
I am highly suspicious of forms of psychological or audience profiling because
such assumptions place limitations on audiences, and how and what they can
learn. This might lead to fulfilling the expectations that one has of audiences,
particularly false ones, rather than inspiring, surprising, and expanding upon
the wonderfully unexpected learning opportunities that arise in classroom
interactions. I have found, for example, that many of the best, most insightful
conversations are unplanned.
Adjusting to an audience is important, but pandering to students ultimately
shortchanges their education. Stereotyping students' learning profiles is a prob
lem, but I would not argue against the view that different groups of students
(generations, majors, and backgrounds) have unique learning approaches. I
don't know how to best reach all of these students individually within a class?
especially large classes?or if it is possible to inspire everyone equally, but I do
find that dedicated students rise to the occasion when given difficult assignments
and when those assignments are taken seriously by the teacher. What I find
important is to help students schedule their work (it is also nice not reading
papers done the night before). When I give a long research paper, students must
produce a proposal, bibliographic updates, drafts at different stages of the paper
(all of which are evaluated along the way), presentations on the paper in order
to consult with peers, and a final paper. I find there is great support for teaching
students only what they want to learn. What would be better is to give them time
to think, to read, to talk, and to write.
40 SUMMER 2005
This content downloaded from
178.22.113.86 on Sun, 14 Mar 2021 22:46:00 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Desmond: Some college teachers say they refuse to "pander" to students by
studying data about learning or teaching styles, and instead give hard research
assignments with plenty of time for them to complete the assignments (this,
the teacher thinks, prevents having to read papers written the night before).
These naive ideas demonstrate an enormous lack of knowledge about teaching
and learning.
What makes teachers think students know how to complete hard research
assignments if they don't teach them? Teaching students how to successfully
complete assignments is not pandering. It is good teaching. It is essential to rec
ognize what students need to learn and to set out to teach them this. I find it
extraordinary that anyone would think students won't write the paper the night
before no matter how long they are given.
Issues about teaching/pedagogy include studies of "audience," our students,
in our respective institutions. Art professors who teach theory, aesthetics, and
art criticism see concrete thinking when they get questions like, "What happens
to our grade if we pick the wrong interpretation?" David gave a good example:
Students "want a body of knowledge and desire facts, landmarks, themes to hold
together the complex histories of artistic practices, institutions, and aesthetics.
They seem to say, just give me one history for now . . ." These are concrete
thinkers. How do we move our students from concrete thinking to abstract/
critical thinking? What do we need to know and what would help us develop
strategies that would work for us as teachers, and for our students as learners?
College teachers even need to teach students how to comprehend what
they read. Yes, read. Students these days don't read the way we did when we were
in college. Contemporary students were brought up on MTV and video games.
They "read" video images better than we can, but they don't read books?text
books in particular. If you don't believe this, give a pop quiz after assigning a
reading in the text and see how many students can pick the key points. How
do students learn to analyze? How do they learn to describe what's there? Or
to interpret and think critically so they can back up what they think about the
meaning of an artwork?
Costache: The students we teach today are different from even fifteen years
ago. Their diversity, knowledge, and identity are validated by new paradigms,
and their operational framework is rooted within the electronic media, which
has truly given them an edge over most faculty and a totally different visual and
cognitive set of references. The information displayed on a screen is, to them, a
vital resource. Understanding what they like, how they think, and who they are
should be a priority for faculty. Unfortunately all of this is often ignored in the
teaching process.
The survey, any course for that matter, should not be perceived as an end,
with specific assessments attached to its completion. Rather, it should be the
beginning of a journey. The true evaluation of students and learning objectives/
outcomes comes not at the end of the semester, but rather after a year or two,
maybe even later.
The survey should inspire students to visit museums without mandatory
field trips, to look at images with confidence, and give them a sense of the value
of art in general outside the academic environment and their degree requirements.
41 art journal
This content downloaded from
178.22.113.86 on Sun, 14 Mar 2021 22:46:00 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Vik Muniz. Action Photo / (Pictures of
Chocolate), 1997. Cibachrome. 40 x 30 in.
( 101.6 x 76.2 cm). Courtesy of Brent
Sikkema, NYC.
Assessment
Kevin Concannon: After many years as a museum educator, I managed a
major project at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (funded by the Lila Wallace
Foundation) that introduced me to evaluation as a tool for developing museum
programs/audiences. It was an eye-opening experience. Curators and museum
educators, generally speaking, seemed to assume that they knew what people
needed to know, regardless of what people might think they wanted to know.
The mandatory evaluation component of the grant-funded project required
us to have teaching (learning) goals, as well as concrete ways of measuring our
success in meeting them. We were also required to define our intended audience
and to survey them to determine their preexisting knowledge as it related to
what we intended to teach them.
It was remarkable how effective this strategy was. Our mission with this
project was to reach previously under served African American communities with
a collection of African art, and it was really amazing what the museum achieved
through the evaluation strategy. Once the grant was over, it seemed to me that
the marketing component held the only real lasting impact. With grant support
seriously down nationally (in the mid-1990s), "revenue streams" became the
focus rather than audiences, and I decided to return to school to get a PhD.
I loved being back in school. It was just as it had been fourteen years earlier
when I earned my BA. Teachers lectured and showed slides. I took notes and
studied flash cards for slide identification exams (and essays). But it seemed odd
in graduate school that no teacher ever spoke about teaching?about how you
do it. Seminars, I suppose, qualify as "active learning." But it seemed as true in
the PhD program as it is in my classroom of artist-undergrads, that the same hand
ful of people did the reading and carried the discussion?and the same people
bluffed their way through the "conversation."
When I came to the University of Akron, I was thrilled to learn during my
faculty orientation that a vice provost was newly on board with the specific
charge of leading an initiative on the scholarship of teaching and learning. Tom
Angelo, who is well known for his work on assessment, ran the Institute for
Teaching and Learning and organized an annual year-long faculty symposium
on the topic. I was fortunate to take it last year.
In the first meeting of the symposium, Tom surveyed the twenty or so fac
ulty members (from a broad range of disciplines) about our learning styles.
The overwhelming majority of us (he graphed it on the board) indicated that
we learned best from lectures and reading. This was, apparently, a wholly pre
dictable result. He promptly informed us that the relatively few people for whom
this "lecture-reading" learning style was characteristic were disproportionately
represented on faculty everywhere. Most of our students, as Kathy has pointed
out, learn by doing. For the rest of the year, we continued to hear statistics along
the lines of "the average lecture holds the average person's attention for a maxi
mum of twenty minutes, after which point comprehension drops radically."
(While we had piles of the best books and articles tossed at us weekly, Wilbert J.
McKeachie's Teaching Tips was far and away the class favorite.) '
Having spent the previous year beefing up my lectures, I was not happy to
hear this. I was convinced at this point that there could never be enough time
42 SUMMER 2005
I. Wilbert J. McKeachie, with Barbara K. Hofer, et
al., McKeachie's Teaching Tips: Strategies, Research,
and Theory for College and University Teachers
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002).
This content downloaded from
178.22.113.86 on Sun, 14 Mar 2021 22:46:00 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
43 art journal
This content downloaded from
178.22.113.86 on Sun, 14 Mar 2021 22:46:00 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Kathleen Gilje. Het Pelskin, Restored (After
Rubens), 2002. Paper prepared with yellow
clay and gray gouache, white gouache, sil
verpoint, bronze pencil. 20 x \4% in. (50.8 x
35.9 cm).
to tell them everything they needed to know. My constant frustration was the
seeming impossibility of balancing dialogue/class conversation with the delivery
of information. It soon became clear, upon reflection, that the information was
only really delivered as it was reframed and recontextualized by students them
selves during the discussions.
We were required as part of the symposium to redesign one course. I chose
the second half of survey ("Proto-Renaissance to the present"). In symposium,
we spent time discussing the crucial importance of group work. Much to my
horror, Tom told us that students often learn better from each other than from
the teacher. This was due, to some degree, to their (more closely) shared experi
ences. Learning happens best when we can relate new knowledge to something
we already understand. We also learned that typical freshmen have the expecta
tion that there is a (single) correct answer to each question. If you can't answer
their question definitively, you are inept in their estimation?or perhaps the field
of art history is a fraud. Only about ?o percent of seniors reach the point intel
lectually at which they accept (and embrace) the idea that there are often multi
ple, equally correct/plausible answers. For my Survey II revision, I chose three
works of art evenly spaced over the course of the semester for "jigsaw" assign
ments. Dividing the class into four groups, each group read a different essay
about the same work of art. (I used those books that compile essays reflecting
various methodologies about the same work: the Norton Critical Studies in Art
History and the Cambridge Masterpieces of Western Painting.) Each student
prepared a written summary of her or his article as the "ticket" to class. They
each brought two copies, one of which they gave to me. The other copy helped
them explain "their" interpretation to their other group members, each of
whom presented a different interpretation. They tried to come to agreement on
the "correct" one, and generally decided that they are (almost) all valid. They
became advocates for some rather off-the-wall interpretations and convinced
each other of their validity.
Other strategies include "minute papers," for which the instructor interrupts
class and asks students to anonymously summarize the main points of the lecture
thus far in a one-minute paper. Problems in understanding emerge quickly and
can be addressed before moving on. Students are asked to introduce themselves
to another student and exchange papers. Reading the papers is still anonymous
to the group as a whole, but students have made another contact in the class. This
introducing is seen as especially important for first-year students, as the ones
who leave often do so because they have made no connections at school.
Desmond: There are a variety of learning theory sources, e.g., Models of Teaching
(Bruce Joyce and Marsha Weil) and strategies for teaching (Magnan). Theorist
Paulo Freir? writes about what it means to be human and to engage in relation
ships of all kinds, including teaching and learning and mentoring relationships.
Parker Palmer writes about the spirit of teaching. William Perry is a cognitive
development theorist, and Craig Nelson teaches about critical thinking and
how to approach teaching it.2 Developing successful teaching strategies, like the
ones Kevin and I advocate on active learning, are promoted by AAHE (American
Association of Higher Education) and POD (the Professional and Organizational
Development network, based at Iowa State University, Ames), which sponsor
44 SUMMER 2005
2. Bruce R. Joyce, Marsha Weil, and Emily
Calhoun, Models of Teaching, seventh edition
(Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2003); Robert Magnan,
ed., 147 Practical Tips for Teaching Professors
(Madison, Wl: Atwood, 1989); Paulo Freir?,
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman
Ramos (New York: Continuum, 2000); Parker J.
Palmer, The Courage to Teach (San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass, 1997) and To Know as We Are Known
(San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1993);
William C. Perry, Forms of Ethical and Intellectual
Development in the College Years: A Scheme (New
York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970). See also
Grant P. Wiggins, Assessing Student Performance:
Exploring the Purpose and Limits of Testing (San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1993), and Teaching
College: Collected Readings for the New Instructor,
ed. Rose Ann Neff and Maryellen Weimer
(Madison, Wl: Atwood, 1998).
This content downloaded from
178.22.113.86 on Sun, 14 Mar 2021 22:46:00 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
45 art journal
This content downloaded from
178.22.113.86 on Sun, 14 Mar 2021 22:46:00 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
brilliant conferences every year with outstanding presentations in these areas,
just like CAA has brilliant presentations by artists about their art and on the
significance of art histories.
Pedagogy
Little: Of course, I am all for training graduate students to teach; I think it is
absolutely necessary, and pedagogical training is a weakness in most graduate
programs. In addition to experience and observation of techniques effectively
employed in classes, I received my training largely through the kindness of my
graduate advisor, Kristine Stices, who simply took the time to discuss teaching
with me. I say kindness because it was not a departmental requirement and I rec
ognized that my advisor took time from her own work even in the midst of a
tenure review. Nonetheless, this training was ad hoc and informal. The question
is: Who will teach the graduate students? And what will they be taught? But the
truth remains that at most universities quality teachers may get teaching awards
but receive little credit for teaching when evaluated for tenure. The new question
might be, who will fund the teaching of graduate students, and will the academy
change its value system? I would hate to see the day when we have teachers and
researchers, but given the marketplace today, that seems to be the direction of
higher education in the future.
Costache: The survey has remained mostly Western, with some sporadic links
to other cultures, and often colleges offer a separate survey of non-Western art
(this raises other important issues, too). However, the students' cultural and eth
nic backgrounds are very diverse. The art used in these courses has become an
almost unquestionable visual trajectory. But does this art journey make as much
sense to our students as it does to us?
I start the survey with a series of questions such as: What is relevant to the
process of making art? Who or what contributes to the creation, analysis, and
dissemination of art? These are questions posed to students, and they have to
think and respond to them. It is a dialogue, not a lecture. Surprisingly, they come
up with many relevant issues related to artists' identity, technology, context, and
so on. This introductory exercise shifts their attention from established master
pieces to a critical thinking process of how and why did these works become
famous, why are we looking at them today.
This discussion also empowers students in looking at art with fresh eyes and
gives them a sense of "ownership," making the survey more of a discovery than
passive learning. It also allows them to establish meaningful connections with
ideas, times, and locations they are disjointed from, by building new dialogues
with their own culture, identity, and interests. It also makes art history an impor
tant resource for studies outside the arts.
An important point in this discussion is the role of reproductions in the
process of teaching art history. The juxtaposition of a small Chinese sculpture
next to the pyramids reveals that these comparisons are arbitrary and artificial
(even though with pedagogic merit), as they can only happen in classrooms, not
real life. But more important, the projected images (digital or traditional slides)
share the same shape, size, brightness, surface, and environment and, to a certain
46 SUMMER 200?
This content downloaded from
178.22.113.86 on Sun, 14 Mar 2021 22:46:00 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
extent, these alterations and decontextualizations create similarities, which dis
solve the uniqueness and identity of the artworks.
Shipps: It seems to me that in any "Introduction to Art" course, be it survey or
"appreciation" (more on which in a moment), we are obligated to inform stu
dents' critical thinking about the subject by acknowledging that art itself, as we
currently understand the term, is a social construct, as is its history?and at least
the history construct is only a couple of hundred years old (arguably, so is the
art one). I point out to them that this idea of art is purely a postindustrial one,
that it wasn't (to keep it simple) until Winckelmann that the modern idea of
making a history of art occurred to anybody at all (and that the historicizing of
art may indeed be what finally validated it as an institution). I point out to them
that once the idea of making a history of art had occurred, it fell to all those
white, European males who saw merit in it to make that history, to look back
down through the (white, European) ages and pick, out of all the stuff that
(mostly white, mostly male) humans had ever made, some stuff that they could
now designate as art, in their modern sense of the term, and weave together to
make the history. All of that can lead off into vast questions of the genesis and
institutionalization of human ideas at all, of course, which is why the need to
keep it simple, here . . . but if we do thus deconstruct the whole art and history
notions themselves, then the critical thinking can (and does) really happen . . .
(and it's generalizable, too, to things beyond just art).
It is possible, too, to effectively counter the risk of existential despair, in all
these undergraduates who have had their art rug pulled out from under them,
by then offering them a working way of thinking about what the whole idea
might actually have been. I suggest to my beginners, that is, that, rather than art
being just an arbitrary social construct, maybe there's a way to think about it that
explains whence/why that construct arose. It's doing this, offering a way to navi
gate the theoretical/conceptual edge between art as a given and art as just another
idea, that I think is so important to any collegiate intro to art, if meaningful learn
ing is to be maximized in it. (And such a working theory is readily?and con
cisely and accessibly?available, I hasten to add, in the rudiments of structuralism
and semiotics ... the selfsame ideas that gave rise to all the po-mo confusion about
art in the first place. I assume that others can be constructed, as well.)
Irina raised a question about the difference between a survey and an art
appreciation course with a chronological approach. As far as I have been aware?
judging, again, from the nature of the several standard(ized) textbooks on art
appreciation?the courses based on them aren't chronological, typically. They
begin with (brief, notoriously clumsy) questions of definition, identify and dis
cuss the elements of visual form, identify and discuss style (s), the various media
. . . and finally, spend maybe a month or so on history (this is chronological,
typically, but of course likely to be so utterly cursory as to be laughable, as com
pared with any term- or yearlong survey).
Concannon: I remember from my SoTAL [Scholarship of Teaching and Learn
ing] seminar last year that most folks were looking for concrete things to take
back to the classroom, and I can recall being frustrated myself at the relative
dearth of material out there on SoTAL in art history. One of the many great
47 art journal
This content downloaded from
178.22.113.86 on Sun, 14 Mar 2021 22:46:00 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
books we used was Barbara E. Walvoord and Virginia Johnson Anderson's Effective
Grading: A Tool for Learning and Assessment.3 Having just worked my way through a far
too-large pile of exams?and anticipating a large pile of papers tomorrow?I'm
reminded of some of the lessons about grading in the SoTAL seminar.
The book deals with establishing fair and understandable grading criteria
that students can clearly understand. The section on primary trait analysis and
rubrics is especially good. As seminar participants, we were asked to select an
assignment from our focus class and develop a grading rubric. The obvious ben
efit of such rubrics is that they can help minimize subjective assessments based
on aspects of the assignment not made clear in advance. It soon became clear
that perhaps the greater benefit of providing such primary trait analysis/rubrics
along with the assignment instructions is that, if well done, they can guide the
student toward the desired result much more effectively. Students, as we know all
too well, can focus on grades more than learning, so if you can demonstrate that
the grade is based on specific criteria that are solidly linked to desired learning
outcomes, you can create a grading system that is seen as fair and?more impor
tant?that promotes the desired learning outcomes and encourages optimum
performance by being specific about expectations.
For their larger research paper, students had to select an object illustrated in
our text and find a minimum of three scholarly articles that interpreted it from
three distinct perspectives or methodologies. They had to summarize each arti
cle, describe the point of view of each writer, critique them, and offer a summary
interpretation that could draw from any and all of them?or not. The handout
described what was expected, the purpose of the assignment, what a scholarly
journal was, how to find articles using appropriate databases (and other strate
gies)?and exactly how the papers would be graded. Point values were assigned
to each necessary component of the paper. For each of these elements, there was
a quality scale of one to three. The rubric was essentially a set of instructions
describing the expected elements (and order of construction) of the paper. On
the whole, the papers were excellent. It also made plagiarism rather impractical
and easily detected (although one student actually ran a Google search and pasted
pieces of four articles together!). Students zoomed in on the point scale to
make sure they included?to the best of their abilities?all the ingredients for
a good grade.
The purpose of this assignment was to help foster an appreciation for differ
ent?even conflicting?interpretations of works of art. Traditional-age first-year
students, generally speaking, tend to want the (single) "correct" interpretation,
and this idea that there can be multiple valid interpretations can be difficult to
get across, in my experience. By running the jigsaw discussions (mentioned
above) throughout the semester leading up to this assignment, the results have
been extremely encouraging.
This assignment/rubric was inspired by the Walvoord and Anderson book.
They actually include one art history example in their text, which I have appro
priated for my own survey class: the Hypothetical Newspaper Assignment.
Students are asked to play reporter (as if they were reporters at the time) and
write a news story about the unveiling of a major art-historical monument.
I assign Masaccio's Holy Trinity, providing them with background reading on
culture and politics in fifteenth-century Florence, with a few tidbits about who
48 SUMMER 2005
3. Barbara E. Walvoord and Virginia Johnson
Anderson, Effective Grading: A Tool for Learning
and Assessment (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass,
1998).
This content downloaded from
178.22.113.86 on Sun, 14 Mar 2021 22:46:00 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
.^'"""" iiaa^ ^^
Eve Sussman and the Rufus Corporation.
Still from 89 Seconds at Alc?zar (Infanta
Enters), 2004. Digital C-print. 24 x 36 in.
(61 x 91.4 cm). Courtesy of Roebling Hall,
New York.
might have commissioned it and why. The purpose of the assignment is to pro
mote the value of historical understanding. (The assignment /rubric in the
book?for the palace relief Ashurnasirpal II at War?was by Christine Havice, now
at Kent State University.) The overall message of the book is that assignments and
their grading are ideally based on desired learning outcomes?and that we pro
mote them as well as measure them.
For my survey, I determined my course objectives to be: a) develop skills in
formal analysis, b) develop an understanding of art within its historical context,
and c) develop an appreciation for multiple interpretations and methodologies.
Course activities and assignments (and grading systems) are (ideally) based on
these objectives. (Rote memorization, of course, is part of the survey too. So I
make PDF files available to students over WebCT that they can print out as flash
cards. I encourage them to study in groups, compiling bullet points on the backs
of their cards?and try to guess the compare-and-contrast problem, as well as
the essay question.)
Little: Pedagogy is so important, but I am not convinced that it can be separated
from content. How do we synthesize the two, and how do we frame a dialogue
that allows educators with different training to discuss the possibilities of this
synthesis? The teacher-or-researcher distinction is a false one, or at least not as
clear-cut. The blindness of institutions in assessing faculty unfortunately feeds
49 art journal
This content downloaded from
178.22.113.86 on Sun, 14 Mar 2021 22:46:00 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
this binary. Still, some of my best teachers have been great researchers; some
have been lousy researchers. I think it is exciting for students of all levels to work
with teachers who are both actively teaching and researching, because it allows
them to learn fresh material from their teachers and see them practice their craft,
in a sense. Also, as a teacher, I feel the excitement of research and discovery flows
into my classes. This is not mentioning, of course, that in the field of contempo
rary art, you must research and keep up to date on new artwork or become a
modernist.
I support the idea of more hands-on training of art history graduate stu
dents in education and teaching. But some of the greatest lessons I learned about
teaching have been from teachers in the act of teaching. Fredric Jameson teaches
a course on modernism that students can register for more than once during
their four years because the content of the course changes from year to year. He
also keeps his library open to all students. Annabel Wharton had weekly one
page response papers to readings. Valentin Mudimbe had students read short
passages of texts aloud and then analyze them as a group. These have become
practices that I have tried to integrate into my own teaching method, and I've
added others, such as collaboratively written papers and reinterpretations of
historic performances through in-class presentations. Also, as I mentioned previ
ously, I have students write papers over the course of a semester, so I can work
with them on a one-on-one basis with their writing and research approaches,
and, I hope, teach the lesson of rewriting and process.
Desmond: The work of a teacher is not that different from that of a researcher
or artist. But many universities don't offer courses devoted to teaching about art.
While this has been done informally in the past (for example, first-year TAs only
grade, while second-year TAs move on to lecturing), it is beginning to become
formalized in graduate classes that address how to write a syllabus and develop
objectives for learning and modes of assessment. Research universities are figur
ing out and foundations (Lilly, Pew, etc.) are giving grants to fund programs to
teach graduate students that their roles in their new institutions will most likely
be more about teaching than about contributing new research or making art.
Afterword
Peggy Phelan: In the two years between our initial meeting and the publication
of this article, several developments took place that merit brief comment. Art
since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, a new survey text written by Hal
Foster, Rosalind Krauss,Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, four of the
most influential art historians writing today, was recently published by Thames
and Hudson. The seven-hundred-page book attempts to respond to recent devel
opments in critical theory addressed throughout the discussion. It will no doubt
be widely adopted as a new text for the art history survey.
More crucially, however, the two terms "art" and "history" have been given
different resonances and emphases by recent international events. The notion
of a vibrant avant-garde seems ever more archaic in an increasingly globalized
art world, while human history itself seems ever more fragile and uncertain.
Historiography presupposes a future in which historical matters will be of
50 SUMMER 200?
This content downloaded from
178.22.113.86 on Sun, 14 Mar 2021 22:46:00 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
urgent interest. The breathtaking scale of genocide, war, nuclear proliferation,
and widely publicized torture (surely this is the first time that so much has been
known about specific acts of torture and death and so little action has been taken
to prevent them) has reminded us that human history is not guaranteed.
As the grim situations in Iraq and Africa unfold, perfecting pedagogy seems
a somewhat romantic aspiration. This does not mean we should not embrace it,
but it does require that we do so with a rigorous ethical consciousness. I hope
that Art Journal can serve as a forum for a future discussion of these complicated
dramas.
Kevin Concannon teaches art history at the Myers School of Art at the University of Akron, where he was
a 2002-2003 SoTAL (Scholarship of Teaching, Assessment, and Learning) Fellow.
Irina D. Costache is an associate professor of art history at the California State University Channel Islands.
She is on the CAA Board of Directors (2001-2005) and is vice-president of Art Historians of Southern
California. She writes on topics related to twentieth-century art and culture.
Kathleen Desmond is Byler Distinguished Faculty and professor of art at Central Missouri State University,
where she teaches art history, aesthetics, and art criticism, writes about contemporary art and artists, and
occasionally makes art. She was chair of the CAA Education Committee from 1999 to 2003.
David Little is director of adult and academic programs at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and
teaches for the Duke University Leadership in the Arts program in New York. He is currently organizing
Person in the Crowd, a show of contemporary art that examines displacement in urban spaces. The exhibi
tion will be on view at the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore this fall.
Peggy Phelan is the Ann O'Day Maples Chair in the Arts and Professor of Drama at Stanford University.
She wrote the survey essays for Art and Feminism (Phaidon, 2001) and Pipilotti Rist (Phaidon, 2001).
Steve Shipps was a practicing artist and commercial photographer, way back when, and has been thinking
about art and its pedagogy since. He has taught studio, appreciation, and theory courses at Emerson
College since 1970. He served as chair of the CAA Education Committee from 2003 to 2005.
Amy Papaelias, who selected the images that accompany this article, is a recent M FA graduate of the
Visual Research Laboratory at SUNY New Paltz and the 2004-05 Art Journal editorial assistant. In 2001,
she received her BA in cultural studies from McGill University.
51 art journal
This content downloaded from
178.22.113.86 on Sun, 14 Mar 2021 22:46:00 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms