MoMa's MOOC, a Global Inquiry Around Art!

Since I started taking MOOCs, all of the course endings have been bittersweet. I hate when they have to end!
Art and Inquiry like the others completed, edcMOOC and modMOOC, has exceeded my expectations and once again helped me learn from liked minded individuals. In the MOOCing world, I've met so many kindred spirits, among them Cathleen Nardi from Hawaii, and Sandra Sinfield, from the UK, fellow MoMA Courserians  whose insightful blogs inspired me to blog again for Art and Inquiry. Regardless of all the hullabaloo around MOOCs, I still believe MOOCs are what you make of them!  Much like the inquiry around art, in a MOOC, the teacher sparks our conversations with stimulating questions and inviting contextual knowledge, but it's up to the students to pave their own learning path and personally engage with the content. We each bring our own unique views and skill set to a MOOC, but just like the dialogues we hope to have with our students about art, MOOCs are meant to help participants "embrace the spirit of collective meaning making." Like a beautiful work of art, a MOOC should leave us feeling like "we know it"...we have a relationship with it...we engaged in dialogue with others and gained invaluably from the experience. 

In this last and final week for Art and Inquiry, MoMA aims to help students achieve this feeling by asking us to design a resource using the concepts we have explored each week to incorporate into our teaching. I have submitted my project online, and will post it on this blog after I receive my evaluation from my peers. 

To recap...

Week One's Big Ideas asked us to consider:

• What are inquiry based teaching methods? 
• Why should we engage in inquiry around art? 

Week Two's Big Ideas challenged us to engage students in:

•  Close looking and Open-Ended Inquiry 

Week Three's Big Ideas inspired us to think of:

• Activities as Inquiry

In our last and final week, Week Four, we are to:

• Put it all together
• Connect Across Disciplines 

How do I plan to incorporate 

inquiry around a work of art into my classroom? 

Botero's "Mona Lisa at 12"

When I taught middle and high school English and language arts, I always tried to incorporate inquiry around works of art. I used works of art as spring boards for discussions about particular themes, settings, or characters in poetry, short stories, novels, biographies etc. At least twice during the school year, my classroom also became a museum of sorts. To review vocabulary words and reinforce the concepts of connotation and denotation, I asked students to use online museum sites to find a famous piece of artwork which illustrated and conveyed the meaning of a word. Each student was assigned one vocabulary word as part of this cumulative review. The piece of art they chose had to be symbolic of the definition of their assigned word. Here is the entire lesson in case you are interested.  

With this critical thinking project, students are able to demonstrate mastery of assigned vocabulary, explore the art world and discover classic and contemporary art and artists. Students analyze, synthesize and evaluate a piece of art as they interpret what the piece means, and how the artwork represents the definition of a chosen or assigned vocabulary word. Students think critically, write descriptively, reflectively and analytically as well as speak publicly to inform their classmates about their chosen or assigned vocabulary word and its artistic representation. 

Another way I incorporated inquiry around works of art involved students creating a literary magazine where they created spoofs of famous artworks and chose classical and modern works to complement and illustrate student writing pieces. Students had to explain why and how certain works of art were an accurate representation for the subject of their writing.  I collaborated with my former school's art teacher, and we had students research and select classic and modern works of art to draw spoofs to include in the literary magazine.  It was a magazine created by kids for kids where over 200 students in my school had an opportunity to not only engage in inquiry around art but also write original poems, short stories, letters, etc. inspired by art.   

What other types of resources do I think I will need? 

Abelardo Morell's
"Manhattan View Looking South in Large Room" 1996

The most important resource of all is the resource of teaching in a supportive environment. Being allowed to teach creatively by offering students the opportunity to create and learn how to think, not what to think, inspired by inquiry around art is a blessing in many school districts. Also, if I were in the classroom, my students and I would need access to art websites, such as MoMA Learning, Google Art, and others. If I could not obtain access at school, I would print out samples of works of art at home of those pieces I wanted students to experience. Funding for field trips to local art museums would also be convenient, but if not feasible, I would resort to online access for a virtual experience.  

Inquiry around art should be a natural component in our lessons. Regardless of what subject we teach, we should always make room for art. 

Thanks MoMA for creating a MOOC that made room for

 thousands of educators around the world to inquire around art!