Museums with a Digital Twist!

One of the best professional development opportunities happens in DC every summer - WISSIT, a "Project Zero-oriented summer institute for DC-area educators with a focus on Cultures of Thinking, Global Competence, and Maker-Centered Learning" (taken from their Twitter feed - thanks!).  I was lucky enough this year to be a part of the faculty and am so honored that I was able to be a part of it. If you'd like to learn more about WISSIT, click here.

At WISSIT, there is a "Day at the Museums" where all participants are invited to attend classes at the many museums around DC. I paired up with Tess Porter, who works for the Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access. We created and taught a course at the Smithsonian Freer|Sackler Museum which incorporated close looking, global thinking, and artful reflection. We ended our session by looking at the Smithsonian Learning Lab - a way to bring the resources at the Smithsonian into your classroom. This free resource is amazing as you can create your own collections of objects across the Smithsonian to share with your students.

We started by looking closely at two objects in the Islamic World gallery and using the Artful Thinking routine "Looking 10 x 2". 

This routine encourages participants to go past the obvious and dig deeper into the object or image that they are investigating. The images below are from the Learning Lab.  When you are on the Learning Lab site, the thinking routine tile also links you to the original resource on the Artful Thinking site if you'd like more information. 

We taught a morning and afternoon course and I was amazed at the differences in the conversations due to the participants. One group had some teachers from religious based schools, and they focused a lot on the imagery and stories that were being told on the canteens. The other group focused more on art over the ages and how cultures can influence each other. I have also used these two canteens with groups of students and we have had completely different conversations. One reason why I love to use thinking routines with the same objects is how over time, you can really hear so many different perspectives. I would love to record these conversations in some way and post it so others can learn from the thinking of a larger group of people.

We then moved on to using a routine from Agency by Design called Parts, Perspectives, and Me. We chose to use this routine to get a more global perspective on how everyone might be involved with these two canteens. Again, we had very different conversations based part of what participants were noticing and their own experiences. Both were powerful conversations and spoke to how our experiences shape our understanding - a good thing to remember as we are welcoming students back to school soon.

When we returned to the conference room at the museum, we were able to reflect on our experience in the gallery through the use of painted reflection. I am a big fan of using painted reflection journals on a regular basis with students. To learn more about them, please see this post from Lisa Verkerk.

We finished our session by exploring the Learning Lab. You can explore the site without creating an account. However, once you create an account, you can save resources as a group (I like to think of it as a file cabinet of photos) and use it with your students. You can choose to share it with others, or keep it to yourself. There are also ways to create student accounts - you can see the site for information about that. On the home page, there is a "Getting Started Guide" which I have linked here. 

I hope that some of these practices can help others think about different ways that art can be brought into the classroom and linked to already established curriculum. I feel that examining art and reflecting (thinking) about our understanding in non-verbal ways is a way to give students ownership of their learning and understanding. 

I am looking forward to next summer and learning more with the WISSIT community!