Arts, Crafts, and Historical Pedagogy

About the time I was beginning to interview with various school districts last year, the school at which I would eventually teach was in the process of becoming a "Visual and Performing Arts Anchor School." What this means, in short, is that I am expected to incorporate visual and performing arts content standards into my curriculum. For me, as a social science teacher, this means both teaching about the art of the cultures we study, and engaging the students in art projects themselves. The first element of the newly-instituted program I was immediately on board with; looking at a society's art is an excellent way to gain greater insight into the context of the times, and pieces of art can serve as great primary sources.

As far as the second element of the program, I had my reservations. If approached properly, art in the history classroom could be useful. But it seemed all to likely that incorporating art into my curriculum would turn into simply doing "fun" art projects, and sacrificing academic rigor and intellectual challenge for student engagement and entertainment. I knew it wouldn't have to be this way; indeed, this was certainly not the intent of the new program. However, I knew that one of my greates challenges would be to keep this from happening.

During the opening weeks of the school year, I did a few things here and there; we drew some pictures, analyzed some Mesopotamian bas-relief sculptures, but the heavy-duty art began as our unit on Ancient Egypt came to a close. You can see some of the sculpted sarcophagi above. They may look simple enough, but you should have seen the disaster that was my classroom at the end of the day. The custodian walked into my room and just about turned around and walked back out.

Later, we painted them:



















And we made and decorated pyramids to house them. (Thanks, by the way, to those loyal friends who spent a Saturday afternoon helping me cut the pyramids from giant sheets of core board.)





We sponge-painted the outsides with mixtures of brown and yellow paint (historical pedagogy momentarily aside, the mixing of paint was a great art lesson in itself for the students), and decorated the insides with designs inspired by art and hieroglyphs we had seen inside Egyptian tombs.

Now, the critically important question: What was the value, really, of this activity? Is there a chance my students' understanding of Egyptian art, religion, or culture was enhanced by what we did? Certainly they enjoyed it. Students usually apathetic were engaged, and those who are usually my most disruptive were my most helpful, generally speaking. But did they learn anything about historical thinking? Were they really growing and developing their minds in the way they ought to be doing in my classroom, or was this little more than a fun arts and crafts day, a publicly funded summer camp?

Now, don't get me wrong, artistic expression is a valuable part of a student's development as a person. I just hope that the way that I use art in my history classroom is not at odds with what I am trying to teach my students about history.