Bridging Communities: NMWA in the Classroom

This article first appeared in the printed version of "Women in the Arts" magazine, published in the National Museum of Women in the Arts' Fall 1999 issue.

The first time I saw an artwork by Mary Cassatt I was ten years old, and I still remember that day. It was my elementary school art teacher who made the introduction. Once every month, she would forego our usual painting and modeling projects for a lesson in art history. In the darkened classroom, I sat mesmerized by the images projected onto the screen as she lectured on the artists' lives, the compositions, the colors, the themes. My favorite painting was Mary Cassatt's "The Bath."

I hadn't thought of my art teacher in years, but a recent visit to Oyster Elementary School in Washington, D.C., reminded me. The colors and smells of Carole Whelan's art classroom are much the same as I remember the: Student artworks cover every free inch of wall space; an army of tempera paint bottles lines a corner table; and an assortment of smells—glue, crayons, magic markers—fills the air.

Although these components of elementary school art education haven't changed much in the 15 years since I was a student, the boundaries of the classroom have. Today, students across the country are benefitting from school and museum partnerships that are brining museum professionals into classrooms and young children into museums at earlier ages. The relationships that develop between elementary schools and museums now go beyond the traditional class field trip or slide presentation to encompass sophisticated and challenging museum lessons designed to complement classroom learning or, in some cases, serve as the sole source of art education where suffering school budgets have limited or sometimes eliminated art curricula entirely.

For the past decade, the National Museum of Women in the Arts has fostered ongoing partnerships with local schools. Most recently, the museum worked with longtime NMWA partner elementary schools Thomson and Oyster on a cooperative learning project that has culminated with an exhibition of student art at the museum. The theme of the "Bridging Communities" project—with lessons conducted in the classroom and at the museum—is the impact communities have on the students' lives.

NMWA staff and the students' teachers helped the students codify the ideas they planned to present on the wall texts accompanying their artworks. "The teachers help us link museum lessons to their curricula and understand the students' interests and developmental levels," says Lisa Madeira, coordinator of Elementary School Programs at NMWA. "They guide the students with their works of art, and we try to make the think about and interpret these works to make the learning extend to a higher plane."

"The kids have been so excited that their artworks are going to be exhibited and that strangers and tourists are going to see them—not just their moms and dads," adds Whelan. "It's a real shot in the arm for me, too. After 29 years of teaching, it's nice to be able to tell your students that their work is of such high quality that it's going to be hung in a museum. It's very rewarding." 

Why museum and school partnerships?

Of the nearly 10,000 museums in the United States, 88 percent provide K-12 programming, spending a minimum of $193 million annually.[1] Their efforts have been bolstered by the support of arts education specialists such as the National Endowment for the Arts, the Getty Education Institute for the Arts, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).

Beverly Black Sheppard, acting director of IMLS, underscores that museum education is important because it offers young people a more self-directed form of learning in the classroom. "When students visit a museum, I think they sense it as an adventure," she says. "Not having the structure of the classroom offers a greater kind of freedom, enabling students to encounter objects in more emotional and more personal ways."

Making museum learning a part of art education, according to Sheppard, also enables teachers to reach students who may not respond to the traditional classroom environment or standard elementary school curricula. I've had teachers tell me over and over again that kids who weren't necessarily the verbal and linguistic high scorers would surprise them in the museum setting by what those students observed and what they shared," she says.

Perhaps the most important consequence of a museum-school partnership, though, is the comfort level the students develop in the museum after several visits and lessons. By gaining an appreciation for and understanding of art, including the ability to interpret, young people can equip themselves with critical thinking skills.

NMWA's programs for young people are designed to "provide balanced lessons that incorporate making and appreciating art," says Curator of Education Harriet McNamee. In the preliminary stages of "Bridging Communities," for instance, NMWA staff used works in the permanent collection and special exhibitions to help the students understand the concept of community. The students visited the museum to view Jennie Augusta Brownscombe's "Thanksgiving at Plymouth" and Lois Maïlou Jones's "Homage to Martin Luther King." Not only did they analyze the works by discussing the communities represented in them; they also were able to experience the art in person and appreciate the works' texture, scale, color, presence—aspects that cannot be conveyed by a slide projector or a study print. "If students don't experience the real thing, they miss out on some of the most important elements of understanding what art is," Sheppard says.

In the final stage of the "Bridging Communities" project, students used watercolors, papier mâché, yarn, and other media to capture, often in painstaking detail, their everyday and imaginary worlds: family traditions, sports teams, utopian cities, private haunts. Their intricate works will be on exhibition in NMWA's Education Resource Center through mid-September.

"We hope the students feel that NMWA is a place where their voices can be heard," Madeira says. "We'd like them to visit us during the summer with their friends and family. It would make this gallery a kind of community center itself."

Note
1. Institute of Museum and Library Services, True Needs, True Partners: 1998 Survey Highlights.