TEACHING ART HISTORY BY MAKING IT PERSONAL By Lele Herron Galer CdeP 1979, art history educator and creator of Art in Action curriculum I WRITE AND TEACH an art history program called Art in Action for students and their parents in my local public school district in Pennsylvania. This program reaches 2,000 children and 200 parent volunteers every year. First, I teach the parent volunteers about the images, and then they teach the kids in the classroom with an interactive approach. This art history lesson is followed by a handson art installation project that allows the kids to take an element of what they learned intellectually and apply it artistically. It is a great learning device, and creates an incredible environment of gorgeous murals throughout all of the schools. One of the most important art history lessons is to humanize the artist and the subject matter. When I was writing Art in Action, I was told by one of the art teachers that the one thing students are never allowed to say is whether or not they like something. What if that is the first thing they are asked? In fact, as soon as the students are prompted with “Do you love it or hate it?” there is an avalanche of enthusiastic responses from every corner. Once they have personalized the work with an emotional response, it is a whole lot easier to talk about what the artist is trying to do in the image. Art becomes relevant. Art history suddenly becomes approachable and meaningful, not rarified and separate. Another way to connect the students and the parents is to ask them how something would look if this or that were changed—a red sky instead of blue, straight lines instead of curvy, etc., and as soon as the viewer is able intellectually to manipulate the imagery elements, the artist become humanized, the image becomes less frozen, and the viewer understands that this artwork was created by hundreds of choices. Anybody can memorize facts, but really understanding any element of history means that you have to get a sense of what it felt like to be there and make the choices that were made. Thacher education allows us to understand the world in a broad view, and that makes the world a more fascinating place to live and learn. Most students and adults are not so lucky, so I use art history, really actively seeing art, as a great way to open up the world of ideas.
FROM THE THACHER SCHOOL TO THE VENETIAN REPUBLIC By Lodovico Pizzati CdeP 1991 I LEFT OJAI after receiving the 1991 History Award, but instead of continuing with history, I specialized in economics with a PhD from Georgetown. However, I treasured the lessons learned at Thacher from Mr. Shagam’s Political Philosophy, Mr. Friborg’s Contemporary American History, Mr. Lamb’s U.S. History, and countless history conversations with Mr. Filippone. At Thacher I was an exchange student coming from Italy, so I had the opportunity to compare different school systems. In Italian schools, history lessons barely made it to World War II, as there were so many ancient Roman and Medieval battles to memorize. Instead, at Thacher, there was so much emphasis on the contemporary. Of course, a complete curriculum takes care of all centuries, but the lesson I learned was that we are living history, we are making history. And when history is approached as a live and evolving subject, it gets intertwined with everything, especially politics and economics. I realized this when, as a graduate student at Georgetown, I attended a lecture by Professor Alberto Alesina from Harvard University, who was presenting a paper that later became a book: The Size of Nations. His point was that political boundaries are not set in stone like geological boundaries. Borders are set by people, and, as anything determined by social interactions, they are eventually bound to change. For example, Alesina has studied the rapid increase in the number of countries in the world, from around 70 after World War II, to the current number approaching 200. He argues that a shift from protectionist policies toward freer trade has made it possible for smaller countries to survive and thrive. This trend is far from over, as Catalonia, Scotland, and the Flanders also have popular and institutional support to become independent states. Surrounded by these current events, I came to think of a similar situation in my home land. I was born and raised in the Veneto region, whose capital, Venice, once had dominated half
The Thacher school 25