Introducing AHTR’s new Contributing Editors

We are so excited that AHTR is growing by leaps and bounds. In the coming months, we’ll be debuting a new site design and a ton of expanded content written by the AHTR peer network. First, though, we have four new Contributing Editors to introduce to the community.

We’d like to offer an incredibly warm welcome to Virginia (Ginger) Spivey, Renee McGarry (already an AHTR board member), Parme Giuntini, and Kimberly James Overdevest.  These four educators will be leading specific content areas on the site and helping facilitate AHTR activities related to teaching art history.

On Monday, April 28, Ginger Spivey will be kicking off her tenure as an AHTR Contributing Editor by posting an introduction to AHTR Hangouts, her area of oversight.  Over the coming months, Renee, Parme and Kimberly will do the same in areas of art history pedagogy they’d like to investigate further with the AHTR community.

We welcome your thoughts and input. If you would like to contribute to AHTR please send any of us an email either via teachingarthistorysurvey@gmail.com or via the Contributing Ed. email addresses below.

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Based in Washington DC, Virginia  (Ginger) Spivey is an independent art historian, focusing on pedagogical uses of technology and innovative approaches to education.  In addition to working in academic and museum settings, she develops content and assessment tools for on-line educational resources. Ginger will be organizing AHTR Hangouts, a series of on-line discussions that will begin later this spring.  The program aims to provide more opportunities to talk with colleagues about pedagogical issues in art history.  Our goal is to build a stronger community of professionals interested in teaching and learning in the discipline.   Stay tuned for more information about this initiative, but in the meantime, please send suggestions about topics you’d like to discuss to Ginger at virginia.spivey@gmail.com.

Renee McGarry serves as Senior Instructional Designer at Sotheby’s Institute of Art working with faculty members to develop and design online courses and use educational technology. As the contributing editor for digital pedagogy, Renee is excited to learn about how other art history instructors are integrating technology and pedagogy in purposeful ways. Her goal is for the technology and pedagogy portion of AHTR  to serve as a starting point for thoughtful conversations about how selections are made regarding technologies, what those technologies mean for our classrooms, how using digital tools fits into the pedagogy of art history, and the broader implications for how we teach in the discipline. Renee is particularly interested in how technology does (and doesn’t) make our classrooms more student-centered and the ways in which we fail as well as succeed. Renee was one of our first contributors to the site. Renee can be reached at renee.mcgarry@gmail.com.

Parme Giuntini is the Assistant Chair of Liberal at Otis College of Art and Design where she also directs the Art History program.  Her key focus for the past ten years has been curriculum design, pedagogy, and the incorporation of technology into instruction and student learning. She hopes her contributions to AHTR will encourage the incorporation of technology to facilitate more active learning practices in teaching and student learning. She’s pioneering “MOOC hacking” (more info to come on AHTR) and wrote on flipping the classroom for the site here. If you have any suggestions on topics contact Parme at pgiuntin@otis.edu.

Kimberly James Overdevest is an Assistant Professor at Grand Rapids Community College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She has an ABD and an MPhil from The Grad Center of CUNY. Kimberly has stepped in to facilitate the AHTR series on teaching at Community Colleges. She contributed the initial post in this series and has also shared several of her assignments and rubrics with the AHTR community. Do you teach at a Community College? If you have something to share or would like to see a particular topic addressed, contact Kimberly at koverdev@grcc.edu.