Harn Museum of Art

What Is Sustainable Pedagogy?

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Student architectural modelThe Humanities have become a sustainability study in these STEM-driven times for higher education. How does our hive survive the academic climate changes of a shrinking professoriate, curricular compression, and a nomadic job market? How do Humanities workers maneuver within and across our smaller footprints at public institutions? My Spring course took into account these changes. I designed “Modernist Studies & Pedagogy Workshop” for graduate students in our PhD and MFA programs. In choosing materials, I took into account my students’ diverse interests and career paths. These initial findings are preparatory material for a design review.

Sustainable Pedagogy is Resourceful. Materials-driven, my seminar incorporated modernist literary, critical, and visual texts; short essays about teaching; resources from our campus museum and library; teaching and conference materials I’ve made; materials from conference colleagues. I included teaching materials from other graduate students and from colleagues in English, Art History, Architecture, the Harn Museum of Art, and UF Libraries. My students worked with these shared resources, and they shared each other’s work. We practiced a renewable resourcefulness.

Sustainable Pedagogy is Cross-Campus. Partnerships I have formed across campus proved as crucial as my expertise in designing my seminar. The campus became our campus unit. We ventured across three colleges: Liberal Arts & Sciences; Arts; and Design, Construction & Planning. Interdisciplinary work requires physically crossing over to our colleagues in other disciplines and consulting with them. Through conversations we discovered that we were teaching some of the same materials.

Sustainable Pedagogy is Collaborative. Within our seminar room my students workshopped Beta assignments for future students and draft instructional resources for our campus museum. As the seminar emerged through our texts and campus partnerships, we became a pedagogy ensemble. We offered a roundtable presentation on teaching close reading for our department’s graduate organization. We visited an Art History class before we team-taught it. We were team taught by an undergraduate architecture class.

Sustainable Pedagogy is Creative. Much of our seminar work involved making instructional materials, generated from broad keywords that did not constrain our thinking. For example: Write an actual assignment about Cities that you would give your own students in a college-level course (or type) of your choice. Think of your Assignments as prototypes or Beta assignments. The idea is to generate materials that we can workshop, refine, and use. Connect your assignment to at least one primary text on our syllabus. This was the most creative work many students had done in a seminar.

Sustainable Pedagogy is Ethical. All teaching materials were shared by permission within and beyond my seminar. Our cross-campus consulting proceeded by outreach and invitation. Where possible, we offered resources in exchange for those we received. We shared our resources; we made new resources; I offered to visit my colleagues’ future courses. Through such ethical practices, Humanities workers sustain one another.

Sustainable Pedagogy is Beyond-the-Book. I have taught and benefitted from book-oriented seminars. Yet if Humanities departments are now envisioning beyond-the-book dissertations, shouldn’t seminar design take this into account? My seminar did not conform to the standard production line: seminar paper > journal article > dissertation > book. Using modular forms, my seminar assignments were outward-facing toward classrooms, conferences, journals, museums, and the public. Such assignments are resourceful for jobs within and beyond the academic market.

Sustainable Pedagogy is Repurposing. I tell all of my graduate students that everything they write or make in their coursework should have at least one afterlife. My debut pedagogy seminar-workshop practiced repurposing, opening new synergies between our academic writing and our teaching. We can repurpose our student assignments into blog posts, conference papers, publications, and museum guides. We can transpose academic writing into crossover writing. We can transport a module from something we’ve made to something we are now making.

(re)Source
I took this photo in the Architecture Teaching Gallery on Feb. 12. There was no label, so I cannot credit this model’s maker. Resourceful in its available materials (wire, wood, paper), the design offers an inventive prototype. The stained plywood marks the material’s prior states as it supports a new geometric form. A fitting figure for the work of sustainable pedagogy.  –MB

  • I wrote this post at the 2019 Humanities Writing Retreat, sponsored by UF’s Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere.

 

Museum Pedagogy: Musings at the Harn

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MightyAphroditesQ&A
Gallery Talk with Anita Huffington’s bronze Kore (1991) in the foreground. Gift of Dr. and Mrs. David A. Cofrin

The Harn Museum of Art, located here at UF, is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. So I’ve been musing on how the Harn has inspired my recent teaching. Although I offer courses in literary studies rather than art or art history, the museum is now a vital resource for my classroom and community teaching. The Harn makes things happen with art. If you’re in the area, consider creating a Harn happening of your own.

 

Responding
From Classical temples to modern museums, our encounters with artworks in public spaces can be intimate, intellectual, spiritual, and creative. We may no longer believe that gods and goddesses inhabit their ancient statues, yet we can still succumb to being dazzled by art–as poet Rainer Maria Rilke was by his Archaic Torso of Apollo. At this year’s “Mighty Aphrodites” talk pictured above, Mary Ann Eaverly and I discussed poems about artworks that depict the Greek goddess of love, beauty, and sexuality (Aphrodite was Venus to the Romans). Emma Lazarus’s sonnet “Venus of the Louvre” distills and dramatizes her museum visit in the late 1880s, when she was entering what would be her final illness. In a sense, she acts as a curator exhibiting one of the world’s most famous statues. Breathing life into the Venus de Milo, her poem lays claim to the Classical tradition as a Jewish-American woman who mourns “for vanished Hellas and Hebraic pain.” The poem’s speaker weeps before the marble statue with dazzled eyes, rendering an aesthetic bliss that is also personal and spiritual. This gallery talk coincided with the exhibition Professor Eaverly and I designed with Harn curator Carol McCusker, “Classical Convergences: Traditions & Inventions.”

Curating
Co-curating a small gallery gave me new possibilities for class assignments–and a new understanding of form. Professor Eaverly and I integrated our “Classical Convergences” exhibition with our recent course on women writers and Classical myth. Our first assignment had students compare two artworks and a poem about either Aphrodite or Persephone, assessing which representation proved most successful in reinventing the ancient figure for contemporary audiences. (Demeter’s daughter, Persephone is also called Kore or Proserpina.) Our final assignment invited students to curate their own gallery on women and myth, creating a pinterest board that included one artwork from “Classical Convergences.” Jordan Bernas gave permission to share this link to her virtual gallery of images, which includes Jiri Anderle’s Cassandra (1984) from the Harn (gift of Melvin and Lorna Rubin).

Curating is a flexible means of approaching, organizing, and interpreting. It opens pathways for viewers to encounter artworks without imposing a rigid route down a one-way street. I find myself using more museum metaphors when I talk to students about their writing. Can you walk around your examples and decide the best way to display them? What do you want your readers to walk away with after your analysis? How much space should each example have in your gallery?

MBCaitlin
MB and soprano Caitlin Pearse

Performing
Like most museums, the Harn is a vibrant space for creative performance, including poetry readings, music, and dance. I emceed a gallery revue of musicians to complement the traveling exhibit “Hoppé Portraits: Society, Studio and Street.” A singer and I performed poems by two writers Hoppé photographed (Ezra Pound and Vita Sackville-West), and the musicians performed popular music from the time period Hoppé worked in London. Soprano Caitlin Pearse recreated signature songs by the Queen of London’s music halls, the fabulous Marie Lloyd (with Thomas Royal on keyboard).

A Little Of What You FancyT. S. Eliot considered Lloyd an artistic genius and admired her attuned rapport with her audience. Bringing the vernacular rhythms of music hall to the museum’s main gallery complemented Hoppé’s street photography. We also offered jazz songs by London favorites Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, highlighting the city’s cosmopolitan culture. Baritone Tony Canty performed these pieces with Royal (and Nick Pierce on bass). The gallery’s reverberant space and array of period photographs brought modernist London to life.

 

JeffAnderlePersephone
Jeff Schweers and Jiri Anderle’s Madchen und Tod (1983). Gift of Melvin and Lorna Rubin

There is always a performative dimension to our museum-going. We create a personal choreography when we walk through museums. We enter the galleries in the order we like, moving in the directions we prefer. We block our own sight lines with each artwork we encounter, experimenting with angle and distance. We pause as we see fit. The postures and expressions we assume may be unconscious or deliberate, momentary or sustained. These individual performances and encounters generate our responses in gallery comment books, class assignments, creative writing, drawings, posts, and artful conversations. –MB