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eLessons
FROM THE WARHOL
By Justin Hopper
The average American high school student’s concept of
President Kennedy’s assassination is as detached as that
of Caesar’s death: “November 22, 1963” …“Dallas,
Texas ” … “end of an era.” But imagine
students across the country and around the world picturing
Jackie’s pink Chanel suit and John-John’s salute
and relating those to the iconic images of their own lives:
armored soldiers taking Elian Gonzalez at gunpoint; Twin Towers
burning from the middle.
When students visit The Andy Warhol
Museum and view the artist’s
relentless series of silk-screened Jackies, it’s just
this kind of association that The Warhol’s education
staff hope kids will make. And now, with the launch of Warhol:
Resources & Lessons—an online, educational curriculum
using Andy Warhol’s life, art, and practice to teach
not just art lessons but lessons across the humanities—those
same connections that only art can catalyze are available to
any teacher and student, anywhere, for free.
“
It’s a magnificent resource that’s right here
in our backyard,” says Sarah Tambucci, director of
the Pittsburgh-area Arts Education Collaborative, “and ‘our
backyard’ means
wherever you sit down at a computer. A virtual field trip
to The Warhol Museum for any child, anywhere in the world,
for
free. That’s a rather amazing prospect.”
Perhaps
just as important, Warhol: Resources & Lessons (edu.warhol.org) shows teachers a way to use art history
and artistic practices, with Warhol as an anchor, to eliminate
the walls between humanities subjects—just as Warhol
himself might have done.
“
We’re not talking about hokey integration, either,” says
Tambucci. “We’re talking about a visual arts
teacher becoming more central to a school by working with
a colleague
in a way that would not have happened had not we and The
Warhol [showed them how].”
The Warhol: Resources & Lessons site contains lesson plans ranging from single-session
projects on topics such as interpreting
symbols and advertiser’s use of scale to in-depth
plans on using Warhol to teach creative thinking and 20th-century
history. It’s the culmination of nearly a decade
of work by the museum’s education department, with
the help of Pittsburgh-area educators and a few turns of
good fortune.
The hard work isn’t done yet, and with a little more
luck, may never be.
Camouflaged Reactions
The Warhol’s online curriculum is somewhat unique in
its approach to teaching across subject lines using a single
artist’s life. It is equally singular in using a Web-based
resource to get students’ sleeves rolled up—and
not just to hold a computer mouse. According to Abby Franzen-Sheehan,
The Warhol’s assistant education curator and the site’s
project manager, one thing the education department learned
from experience is that students learn from experience.
“
Teaching in the galleries, when we give a tour, the goal is
not to be a walk-and-talk, one-way presentation, but instead
an active dialogue. It’s to create an experience that
they remember,” says Franzen-Sheehan. “People remember
much more of what they tell you than of what you tell them.
You need an activity to get people to open up about their lives
and perspectives.”
Take, for example, Warhol’s “Camouflage” series—essentially
a multi-colored abstraction of a standard camouflage pattern,
as well as prints of Warhol’s self-portrait and the
Statue of Liberty overlaid with the pattern. It’s been
the basis for one single-session lesson plan on the new Warhol
site.
Students looking at the artwork, downloadable from the
online
curriculum, write free-association pieces about their feelings
towards the works, then do the same while three pieces
of music play as they view the “Camouflage” works.
To an English teacher, it might be an exercise in writing.
An art
or music teacher might use it to discuss how works are viewed.
But more than that, it’s a lesson in making connections
between all these disciplines.
“
People begin realizing, ‘My feelings about camouflage
affect how I view this work,’” says Franzen-Sheehan. “‘The
sounds I’m listening to affect how I view it.’ People
become aware of how they respond to art, and what influences
that response—what affects the way they see an artwork.
It all stemmed from one piece of artwork, and you can do
that [lesson] with first graders or with 80 year-olds.”
The
Warhol’s educators also believe that, with art, teachers
can approach subject matter that might otherwise be deemed
difficult or even controversial. One example is Warhol’s
silk-screened Guns. Franzen-Sheehan says that a museum,
and its extensions through the likes of the The Warhol’s
online curriculum, “offers a safe place to discuss
such difficult issues, because it’s not your own
life you’re
discussing.” With the Guns lesson, The Warhol offers
teachers a way to approach the Second Amendment, school
violence, and the entire history of firearms in America
from a “safe” vantage
point.
It’s this versatility—a curriculum that
allows teachers to mold lessons to their classroom needs—that
teachers appreciate in Warhol: Resources & Lessons.
“
Oftentimes the mistake that museum educators make is designing
a kind of ‘teacher-proof’ curriculum,” says
Jim Reinhard, art department chair at North Allegheny High
School and one of many regional educators who worked with The
Warhol, “something so canned that it takes a lot of manipulating
to fit our curriculum, whatever that might be.” Not
so at The Warhol.
e-Lessons in Humanities
Such versatility and depth of material is, in some respects,
due to the similarly non-traditional way in which Warhol:
Resources & Lessons came into being. Jessica Gogan has a hard time pinpointing
when work began. As Assistant Director for Education and Interpretation
for The Warhol, Gogan is an integral part of what she sees
as an organic evolution over the past decade that brought about
the online curriculum. From the launch of Education News, a
six-page newsletter The Warhol’s education department
began in 1998, every step has taken the department closer
to its goal of integrating Andy Warhol into a holistic
educational
approach.
“
The way we’ve worked in the education department
is to look to Warhol’s practice, his life, and his
work to engage students in their contemporary world,” says
Gogan. “So,
it’s not about Campbell’s soup, but what was
Warhol doing that made him reproduce Campbell’s soup
the way he did?”
At the same time the department began
distributing Warhol-centric, cross-disciplinary lesson
plans via Education News—teaching,
for example, about mythology using their 2000 Cocteau exhibit—the
education department was working hard to include regional
educators as partners, not just the recipients of materials.
In 1998
the Museum began working in year-long collaborative art-making
projects with Schenley High School, Andy Warhol’s
alma mater, CAPA (Pittsburgh’s High School for the
Performing Arts), and AIR (Artist Image Resource, a master
art studio).
Over the years these collaborations turned into a successful
experimental and field testing ground for new curriculum.
Led by Tresa Varner, assistant education curator for Artists
and School Partnerships, much of the curriculum developed
for these partnerships is core to the new online curriculum.
The
close relationships between the museum and the schools
continue to evolve. Varner is now an adjunct faculty member
teaching
printmaking at CAPA. And with help from third parties such
as Tambucci’s Arts Education Collaborative, and through
its annual Teacher Open House, The Warhol forged relationships
with an even larger group of educators by offering curriculum
and field trip ideas as well as asking teachers to challenge
the museum with their needs. With every lesson either formulated
for or tested by museum staff or classroom teachers, the
Warhol education staff feels it provides a more useful
set of lesson
plans and resources.
“
We always say that we can’t put it up on the website
unless we’ve tried it. We can’t publish it
until we’ve taught it,” says Franzen-Sheehan.
It’s part of a philosophy that has helped make the
online curriculum the opposite of “teacher-proof.” It’s
teacher-crafted. As Gogan said during October’s Teacher
Open House, where the new online curriculum was officially
launched, “We were told by teachers that, ‘if
you have downloadable PowerPoint presentations, we will
love you.’ And
we want to be loved!”
Along with PowerPoint offerings,
every plan includes an “At
a Glance” sidebar that offers everything from downloadable
presentations, artwork galleries, and activities, to basic
needs such as a suggested timeframe for each aspect of
the lesson. And at the bottom of each sidebar is a listing
of state
educational standards that the lesson addresses.
Standards
are a touchy subject in the arts education world—particularly
since the introduction of 2002’s No Child Left
Behind Act. Tambucci refers to the legislation as a “double-edged
sword.”
“
On the one hand,” she says, “it calls the arts ‘core
academic content,’ but then it says they’re only
going to test in reading and math,” to determine schools’ progress
and, therefore, funding. But with a curriculum like The Warhol’s
Resources & Lessons, which not only teaches about art
and artists but also uses Andy Warhol to teach across various
other
humanities subjects, the standards issue becomes a little
less black-and-white.
“
The content has implications beyond just art teachers,” says
Noreen Garman. Along with teaching curriculum development in
the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Administrative
and Policy Studies, Garman also served as an advisor to The
Warhol’s online curriculum development. This is something
in which people of all disciplines can find something to
teach.”
“
What we’re trying to demonstrate is how you can use
a single artist’s work, life, and practice as a way
to teach across the humanities,” says Gogan. “It’s
understanding that you can mine your own local context,
your own realm.”
Translating Andy
The launch of the Warhol: Resources & Lessons site represents
only the first step in what might be an ongoing process of
addition and revision. At least it will be if Gogan and Warhol
Director Tom Sokolowski have their way.
On the museum’s
2005 traveling exhibition tour of Russia, a grant from the
Alcoa Foundation not only allowed the translation
of educational resources into Russian (hence the Russian-language
version of the online curriculum), but also galvanized the
long-talked-of Web resource center. But as Sokolowski points
out, Warhol in Russia doesn’t mean the same thing as
Warhol in America.
“
This curriculum was developed primarily and firstly in Pittsburgh
by our staff,” he says. “It’s what we think
about Warhol. But in Russia, for example, they do a different
kind of a riff on it, so we’re saying, ‘Take
what we’ve done, take these projects, tweak them or
change radically.’ Then we can put their ideas on the
Web and we see how they did it. So it’s many people
reading the same texts, and then coming up with very different
interpretations.”
Diverse schools in Pittsburgh and
Russia have done just that. Through the site, students
learned that Warhol collected
the people, places, and things around him to make his art
through
the whatever-comes-across-your-desk approach of Time
Capsules or Screen Tests,
his short film portraits that number more than 500. This
inspired local teachers to use collecting
as a theme to explore a variety of ideas in art and social
studies—and
World War II, in particular, with students examining a
soldier’s
locker and then their own. Russian teachers were then inspired
by their peers in Pittsburgh, and in their own exploration
of school lockers found the regular presence of dust, which
triggered an idea for their own photographic project.
In
addition to placing lessons into context for various audiences,
Gogan says that further translations—in Portuguese,
Spanish, and possibly Chinese—are in the works, perhaps
in connection with future traveling exhibits. And right
here in Pittsburgh,
other versions of the lessons of Andy Warhol are being
translated for students with very different needs.
Lynda
Abraham-Braff’s students at Wesley Spectrum Highland
School span the entire K-12 grade range, as well as a similarly
broad range of emotional and social challenges. Because
of the different abilities of her students, Abraham-Braff
must
alter any lesson plans and activities she gets from any
source, an opportunity that Warhol’s online lessons
offer. But often, more so than Guns or the Kennedy assassination,
Pop
Art, or American history, Andy Warhol becomes the lesson
himself.
“
Warhol was this strange kind of a guy,” says Abraham-Braff, “and
the lesson is, that’s okay. We’ve done a lot with
our kids doing self-evaluations, discussing aesthetics, realizing
that different things have different values. It gives our students
an opportunity to be individualistic and realize that, as long
as they’re within certain bounds, that’s all right.
It’s okay not to say what somebody else has said, and
that’s the most important thing.”
The online curriculum is made
possible through the funding and generous sponsorship of Alcoa
Foundation. Additional funding is provided by W.L.S. Spencer
Foundation and Verizon. Educational programs at The Warhol
are made possible through gifts from the Mellon Financial Corp.,
The Grable Foundation, Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield, The
National Endowment for the Arts, Pennsylvania Council for the
Arts, Surdna Foundation, and YouthWorks.
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Copyright (c)
2006 CARNEGIE Magazine. All rights reserved.