Curricular Engagement

It has been a robust year for Academic Programming. We have worked with faculty and classes in thirty-one different departments and programs. One developing trend is the integration of the museum into introductory classes. Anthropology 3, Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, taught multiple times over the year by two different faculty members, centers the museum as a site for anthropological investigation. Students observe visitors in the galleries, interview museum staff, and write object-based essays on works in the collection. 

Associate Professor Sienna Craig reflected on the students' experience:

"It is not an overstatement to say that having the museum open fundamentally reoriented the intro. class. We are trying to capture the attention of a very diverse group of students in their knowledge of and interest in the subject matter. The imaginative act as well as the critical thinking that can come from working with works of art can engage a class in ways that are pedagogically meaningful and (in a good sense) leveling."

Art history professors Mary Coffey and Chad Elias curated the exhibition New Humanisms for their students in Art History 5, Introduction to Contemporary Art. The show brought together a diverse group of works ranging from a beaded statue by Joyce Scott to a shaped landscape photograph by Michael Namingha and A Box of Smile by Yoko Ono. As Mellon Faculty Fellows, Jennifer Lynn, language program director in the Classics Department, and Marcela di Blasi, in Latin American, Latinx, and Caribbean Studies, studied the collection in depth, developing strategies to integrate it into their teaching.

Academic Programming has also developed creative and innovative class sessions with Introduction to African American Studies, Introduction to Archaeology, Film History I (Silent to Sound), History 02: #EverythingHasAHistory, Introduction to Classical Archaeology, and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies 10: Sex, Gender and Society. We support introductory studio art classes in drawing, sculpture, panting, architecture, and photography, as well as introductory language classes in French, Italian, Latin, and Portuguese. For Humanities 01: Dialogues with the Classics we partnered with the Dartmouth College Library so that over 90 students could look at Hood objects and Rauner Special Collections Library books side by side in the Bernstein Center for Object Study. Through these objects, the class broadened their views of the society described in Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility

With the closing of the museum in mid-March due to the COVID-19 pandemic, our team quickly reoriented to remote teaching. We provided high-quality images to faculty who wanted to integrate them into their lectures, developed new pedagogical strategies, and learned new technologies (including Zoom and VoiceThread) to teach synchronously and asynchronously. Faculty continue to work with the Hood Museum, to use our collection as the basis for scholarly inquiry, and to collaborate with academic programming staff to plan meaningful, rich learning experiences for students. 

The impact of Academic Programming across the campus is due in large part to Katherine Hart. Kathy was the first curator of academic programming at the Hood Museum (and in the nation) and developed teaching with the collection to such an extent that her contributions cannot be overstated. Her success led to the expansion of the department and demonstrated the necessity of the Bernstein Center for Object Study. She retired at the end of June and we will deeply miss her, both professionally and personally.