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I recently tried an approach to teaching art history that involved social media. This approach showed how social media, which has become so central to many young people’s lives, can be harnessed to achieve a rich and interactive learning experience that can change students’ attitudes to self-directed research. Students were encouraged to engage with the material through identities created in and conducted through Facebook. The results were striking and could easily be reproduced in other areas of the curriculum.

During Art History class, Form IV students looked at the Pre-Modern era, learnt to analyze a work of art and were introduced to thinking like an art historian. They also, in many ways, became artists themselves. As an introduction to the Modern art period, students were each assigned an art movement from Realism to Post Modern Art. They then had to choose an artist from their art movement, the one who best embodied the essence of the style for them and in whom they wanted to take a particular interest.

Students set up a Facebook page in that artist’s name and, in the two weeks that followed, they researched their chosen artist and represented him or her in exchanges with their classmates using Facebook. Students engaged with the material and immersed themselves in the subject to a degree that was unprecedented for this class.  I myself was forced to reflect on the fact that every human being wants to learn, but sometimes the methods we use only suppress this desire.

This group was not a particularly academic one, and it was this characteristic that pushed me to find other ways to teach them. For the project to turn out well I had to become an artist too and created my own artist page. I was Jean-Michel Basquiat as a representative of Post-Modernism and had to set the tone for the project with my page. Students chose to be Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali, Claude Monet, Umberto Boccioni, Kurt Schwitters, Frank Stella, Jackson Pollock, Vladimir Tatlin, Pablo Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh, Jean Millet and Edward Munch. Needless to say, interacting with all of these artists who were in turn my students was a lot of fun.

The student that chose Warhol was amazed by the scope of his work and was actually the funniest one to interact with.  This screenshot shows the beginning of the project and how she was adding basic information to his profile.

In the beginning of this project, the student that chose to be Pollock was very impressed by Pollock´s drinking.  She found a lot of information about that aspect of his life and posted a lot of comments about this.  Later, she did do more research and moved away from this to talk about his painting technique. It is not seen in this image, but as Basquiat myself, I would guide students by asking them questions about their work, or adding status updates about ‘my own’ artwork.
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Students were interested and excited from the outset but this enthusiasm only grew as the project progressed, making those who thought they had no interest in art and artists connect with the motivations and intricacies of artists´ lives and fall in love with their artists, seeing them through a different lens, the human one.

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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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