Contribute

Art History Teaching Resources thrives through peers sharing resources with each other and the ensuing debate on effective pedagogies for teaching art history to undergraduates.

So, you have a successful outline for a response paper assignment? Think your syllabus is tried-and-tested? Willing to share your great lecture on Islamic architecture? The goal is to develop a community of teachers that use the materials, and also re-populate the site with resources of use to their peers. You can contribute by emailing teachingarthistorysurvey@gmail.com with any materials you’d consider sharing. You can also post comments and extend the public discussion on all aspects of teaching on the AHTR journal.

Why?

The project began in the Art History department at the Graduate Center, The City University of New York, in early 2011. There was no standard set of resources for art survey teachers at CUNY, and most new teachers went through the stressful process of “reinventing the wheel,” creating their own lectures, PPTs, and other teaching materials. AHTR streamlines this process, connects with other similar endeavors, and forms a community of peers. It provides a basic springboard for teachers of the art history survey, offering detailed thematic lesson plans, ready-made PPTs, and templates for syllabi and assignments for the global art history survey. In this way, instructors can focus on adding their own specialist emphases to the AHTR materials and developing their teaching strategies—not prepping basic materials that already exist.

There is no “perfect” way to teach the art history survey, and the survey itself is a contentious beast—what other models might exist to introduce undergraduates to visual culture? The site is meant to support emerging teachers as they take their first steps, and—by providing a starter kit to lessen the panic—to give teachers room to innovative new pedagogical models.

How does this work?

You have expertise certain areas. We would like to share your basic survey-level lesson plan for this area on the website, or a general class activity, media resource, or engaging reading you’re willing to contribute. Whichever way you teach, please consider sharing a tried-and-tested lesson plan, PPT, classroom exercise, a link to great resources, or non-traditional image clusters to the site for others to use. The site is based on a peer-populated model—all content is available to members, and access is (and always will be) free. Materials are organized by chapter (for teachers who use an outline like Stokstad’s) and also by theme (for teachers who choose a non-chronological approach). The site contains a core set of teaching resources, which are available for download and to which other teachers are invited to submit their own “best of” examples.

To underscore, this is a collaboratively-authored site and all documents are a jigsaw of specialized knowledges coming together in an open-source peer-populated format.