Strategies
It is important for students to arrive at our culminating field study at the Gilcrease with a proverbial tool box of strategies and skills with which to carry out their tasks. I want to begin with a fairly blank slate in that they will know very little about the westward expansion events of the nineteenth century. They need to have some base from which to launch into our topic, but I do not want to give away any bias or affective opinion about any of the subject matter: just the facts, ma'am at this juncture. This lesson unit will have greater impact if students are allowed their own inquiry and questioning as they review the art works.
Interactive Artist Journal
I want my students to be fully engaged and interacting with the content of this unit, primarily the visual images. I will have them create an interactive Artist Journal in which to collect all content and analysis notes, handouts, visual images, and their own processing of the activities. Pablo Picasso stated that "All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up." Some students find that expressing themselves in untraditional (not verbal linguistic) ways can be threatening, the old "I can't draw" self-limitation. However, I want all of my students to have the opportunity to tap into their own unique ways of experiencing art while at the same time learning from it. The Journal will be set up so that all of the important content and notes will go on the right hand page of their Journal and their processing of the material will go on the left hand page. It is important that my students have a consistent place to collect their "learning" and then to process it in their own unique ways. This may mean illustrations, charts, cartoons, etc. The important thing is for the interactive Journal to become a positive, powerful and personal connection to the material we are learning.
Talking Statues
Before we get into the nuts and bolts of how to view and analyze a work of art for the purpose of uncovering historical meaning and connection, I need to hook them in. To do this I will use John Gast's American Progress with the Talking Statues strategy, a form of tableau vivant. We will begin with this immediate and powerful art image that we will share together on the Smart Board. This painting is a narrative unto itself and highly detailed, and draws the viewer in with numerous, easy to "read" references to westward expansion. It is rich with color and graphic appeal and the details within are sharp and clear. It is the perfect non-threatening painting to model all of the skills and steps the students will need when critically analyzing art. It will work well with this strategy, wherein my students will be randomly assigned a character or characters in the painting. Preselected Role Cards will determine the students who will come to the front, step in front of the life-sized painting on the board, and get into a similar position as the characters in the painting. Once they have "frozen" into their character(s), I will interview them about what they are doing, where they are going, what do they see, where have they come from, etc., much like a news reporter. After I have questioned each group of students I will allow the class to pose questions or thoughts that we have not yet brought up. This strategy allows all of the students to place themselves within the art work, helping them make those important observations and connections to the work's historical and narrative value. With this strategy at the beginning of the Unit, students have been invited into a world of art that they now find interesting and relevant.
Levels of Questioning
In order to view art works critically, my students will need to learn the skill of questioning. After the initial Talking Statues activity, my students will return to their seats and begin this next phase of image analysis. I want my students to be able to bring the visuals and images to life in order to be able to pull out significant themes, narratives, and events of westward expansion. The use of questioning strategies will develop their visual literacy skills and will allow them to build on their own knowledge of the topic through higher-level thinking and deductive reasoning. When my students interact with visuals in this way, observing through good questioning, they will remember the relevant content in much more powerful ways.
In order to learn the questioning technique for further analysis, we will use the same painting we have been working with. I will go over the three Levels of Questioning for images with the class as well as give them a handout with all of the examples and information. I want my students to ask the types of questions that will lead them to evaluative decisions about the content and allow them to extract relevant meaning from the image. We will have already used similar Levels of Questioning for primary source texts and other activities in our class. These questions, however, are specifically tailored to image analysis. Students, in their small groups, will now work through the three levels of gathering evidence, interpreting evidence, and making hypotheses (see Activity Two below). The Level One questions will allow students to look for details that might reveal something about the visual. The Level Two questions encourage students to begin making inferences from the physical details they discovered in Level One. Finally, the Level Three questions will require that students use the evidence and inferences to make a hypothesis about what is happening and why, using their higher level critical thinking skills.
Collaborative Jigsaw Puzzle
Another strategy I will use is a version of the collaborative activity known as Jigsaw. In a Jigsaw collaborative activity students are placed in small groups and given different roles within that group. They will form new groups with students from other groups who have been assigned the same role or topic as them. This is often called an expert group, as they master something with this group well enough to take back to their original group and teach it. In this case, the students will form an expert group with students who have randomly received a section of a painting that they have as well. This strategy allows for collaborative learning with many other different students, some much needed opportunity for bodily kinesthetic movement, an engaging way for students to see multiple works of art in a brief amount of time and crucial practice and processing of the newly acquired questioning technique.
Direct Instruction: PowerPoint
Ultimately, I want my students to determine for themselves, through their critical analysis of powerful art works, whether or not European-Americans of the nineteenth century portrayed the Native American in certain ways due to their absolute devotion to the concept of manifest destiny. They must be able to support their own claims with evidence from the paintings and sculptures, but also will need background knowledge to achieve success. I will create a visual PowerPoint lecture that will address the different ways that Native Americans were portrayed in works of art in order to further inflame expansionist goals: the Native American as "Noble Savage", the Native American as the source for frontier conflict that must be eradicated, and the Native American as a doomed and nostalgic figure. The lecture will also include the romanticized frontiersmen and landscape paintings that further created the mythology and ideology of the expansionist art. Here is where I will spotlight paintings by artists such as George Catlin, Charles Bird King, John Wesley Jarvis, Seth Eastman, William T. Ranney, Henry Farney, Alfred Jacob Miller, Charles Shreyvogel, William Keith, Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, Frederick Remington, James Earle Fraser, and Olaf Carl Seltzer. These are the artists who have seminal works at the Gilcrease Museum for my students, but there are many other choices that would suit any school district region or specific topic. (A comprehensive list of all artists, art works, and where to find them will follow this unit) Students will record notes from the PowerPoint into their interactive Artist Journals so that they have access to the basic content while at the museum.
Compare and Contrast: Sensory Figures
When the Direct Instruction has ended, students will be given the opportunity to process the information through a Sensory Figure illustration. I will ask students to partner up with one person at their table. The partners will complete a Sensory Figure for either a Native American on the frontier or a European-American settler on the frontier. They will draw the figures as authentically as they can and place a minimum of two thought bubbles above each character. Inside the bubbles they will write from the perspective of the character. What are the perspectives of the two opposite groups? How do they see one another? These are the questions my students should be tackling by this point in the unit. This is an essential activity that will allow students the necessary time to process the information with a partner while determining the perspectives of the major players in the manifest destiny drama.
Museum Field Study Trip
My students will use their information and analysis skills with genuine art works from our era of study. I will organize a Field Study Trip to a local museum, the Gilcrease Museum of Art, where the students will analyze works of art, including many works that they have seen in the classroom. Expectations for acceptable behavior and deportment will have been discussed in class and written into their Artist Journals. Procedures will include how to speak to each other and docents quietly and professionally, how to monitor their body movements, and how not to touch a work while getting as close as possible. They will be given small pencils and allowed to bring only their Artist Journals with them to the museum. They will attend in small groups and be further divided up once at the museum. I have three overall goals at the museum, one being that students be able to locate, analyze and evaluate assigned works of art for the information they impart about the unit's primary Essential Question. I also want my students to be completely saturated by the stunning visuals of westward expansion. A third goal is for my students to have a deeply personal experience with great art, one that will become a part of who they are as a person. I believe that art is for everyone and that everyone's reaction and interaction with art is valuable.
Fish Bowl Discussion
After our experience at the Gilcrease Museum, I will have my students participate in a Fish Bowl discussion, an activity in which a small group of students engage in a discussion of the Essential Question while the remainder of the class observes and takes notes. Once the discussion is going well, discussion circle members may leave the circle and become observers and observers may come into the discussion. The discussion circle participants will interact with each other to create meaning in response the art works and background information, constructing new insights as they speak and listen to the insights of others. Observers will make notes about cogent points made or "aha" moments that they relate to. Students will already be well prepared for the discussion and will enter it armed with their analysis questions, claims and evidence in their Artist Journals. Prior to the actual discussion, I will also ask my students to respond to four queries that will help them determine what they still want to know or what interests them the most.
Assessment: Poem for Two Voices
The unit will culminate with the students collaborating on a Poem for Two Voices, a strategy that will allow students to further process what they have learned about our topic after a critical analysis of authentic works of art and deep discussion. A Poem for Two Voices asks students to compare and contrast the two sides of our unit of study: the Native American and the white frontier settler. This strategy requires my students to work with a partner, as they each take a side. The partners will take turns writing the poem from the two perspectives, while in the middle of the poem will be ideas both sides agree on or things that would both sides would say. This will be done in class.
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