ALT/space

Sometimes you don´t know your teaching practice has changed until you´re confronted with a different environment and audience. I recently changed gears from teaching in a museum to teaching in a school and the transition has been a radical experience for me as a teaching artist.

In February 2011, I moved back to Lima after spending ten years in New York as a teaching artist working in museums and developing my own artwork. I was offered a position in San Silvestre School, a British, private all-girls school with the goal “to provide an integral education based on the best aspects of the British and Peruvian educational systems….”  Coincidentally, it´s also the one I attended all my school life, and considered one of the most prestigious schools in the country.

I now teach high school students studio art, the IGCSE University of Cambridge program, the International Baccalaureate (IB) Art Program and Art History. Although so different to what I’d been doing, it also seemed a perfect opportunity to apply and adapt all I’d learned in New York to a completely different setting, especially in art history.

Before moving to New York, I worked in a different British school in Lima where art history was part of studio arts.  I taught the subject using what I then considered an interesting approach, looking back though, it was mostly linear. This methodology would not be enough in my current teaching.

In New York I worked interpreting art with museum visitors, engaging diverse audiences in looking at and contextualizing artworks and objects. Now, however, when faced with teaching art history as a subject to young people in a school setting, without the context of the museum (objects, artworks and through these, the presence of artists) it felt isolated, arid, bland. I’m a firm believer in teaching from my passion, that as I teach I become a learner myself; the dissatisfaction I felt using a traditional practice became a challenge.

At San Silvestre, art history is offered as an elective course not part of the IGCSE program which students follow in Forms III and IV. The course is intended as a connection to the arts for students with an interest in the subject but who do not necessarily want to make art or consider themselves ‘creative enough’.  When I met my students however, they had a perception of art history as a boring subject. Or so they thought.

In a standard art history course students ‘look at’ artists and their practice in much the same way that zoo visitors look at animals: isolated from their environment, without actual objects or a direct artist connection. This lack of connection led me to find other ways to teach what the syllabus requires while at the same time encouraging students to think like art historians and be inquisitive about the process of creating art, building connections with their own lives and humanizing the artists being studied.

When teaching in a museum, the direct experience of engaging with artworks created an immediate interest in the students and prompted them to ask questions. The physical presence of a drawing or a painting, an installation, a video that you experience with your senses is crucial.  What could I do, without the presence of actual artworks that would help students understand how artists think and why they make art?  Most importantly, why should they care? 

Student displays. To the left, museum of Japanese mandalas and to the right, ‘awana’, museum of Paracas (Peruvian pre-hispanic) culture which showcased the influence of this ancient culture in modern Peruvian art.

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