Month: December 2020

Cultural norms these days are changing quicker than some of us could keep up with. Even the study of such a seemingly stable discipline as art history has turned out to be controversial. Back in January, Yale University announced it would eliminate its popular survey course “Introduction to Art History: Renaissance to the Present,” in response to student complaints that its curriculum promoted an idealized Western “canon” — a product of an white, straight, European and male cadre of artists — at the expense of other narratives. This was followed by heated debate both in mainstream and social media: should universities teach traditional art history surveys or not?

The decades-old Yale’s art history survey course, covering the evolution of art from 1300 to the present time, has been one of the department’s quintessential classes and most popular offerings. This spring, however, it was taught for the last time. As Art history department chair and the course’s instructor Tim  Barringer explained, the course was “problematic,” because it put European art on a pedestal, at the expense of other artistic traditions “equally deserving of study.”

The last, 2020 edition of the course was taught with an array of modifications. This year, the emphasis was placed on the relationship between European art and other world traditions. The class considered art in relation to “questions of gender, class and ‘race’” and discussed its involvement with such issues as Western capitalism and climate change. The 300 students of the course were also invited to write an essay nominating a work of art that has been left out of the course’s curriculum or its textbook.

According to Yale Daily News, instead of this singular survey class, the Art History Department will offer a range of others, such as “Art and Politics,” “Global Craft,” “The Silk Road” and “Sacred Places.” Barringer added that in two or three years, his department will offer a substitute class to “Introduction to Art History.” But the new class “will be a course equal in status to the other 100-level courses, not the introduction to our discipline claiming to be the mainstream with everything else pushed to the margins,” Barringer said.

New introductory courses will be added in the next few years, but they will not be billed as a comprehensive survey. Wanting to deflect accusations of iconoclasm, Barringer — himself a specialist in European art — presented the move as “expansive rather than reductive,” positioning the changes as part of an effort “to offer Yale undergraduates a range of introductory courses that do justice to the diversity of our faculty’s research, of Yale’s collections, and of the student body itself.”

The news elicited a maelstrom of opinions online, causing particular unrest among conservatives who perceive the change as a disservice to students looking for a broad overview course, rather than more specialized offerings. A headline in the conservative journal Commentary read “Yale’s Art Department Commits Suicide.” The New York Post labeled it ‘PC idiocy’, while the renowned critic James Panero in his article in the Spectator simply likened Yale’s art-history department head to Joseph Stalin.

Those opposed to the new development argue that the history of art reflects the history of the world. No matter if we like it or not, the Renaissance was “intertwined with the rise of modern banking, a time when power-hungry and wealthy patrons used art for self-glorification”, and colonialism. However, they warn art historians against erasing the past with its glories and warts, for this will only leave future generations of students ignorant. Failing to understand the evolution of art, The New York Post writes, the students won’t be able to criticize it. Nor will they be able to appreciate other artistic traditions and customs, for they will have nothing to compare these to.

The conservative media also make a point that although Yale claims the introductory course is being eliminated in response to student uneasiness, the interest in the course among undergraduates skyrocketed following the news that this will be the last time it is taught. During the school’s shopping period, when students sit in on potential courses before officially enrolling, more than 400 people attended the semester’s “Introduction to Art History” class, though the course is capped at 300 due to space constraints. This fact is considered to serve as a proof that the decision to drop the course in fact comes from the top, not the students.

However, other experts rightfully note that the debate whether the curriculum should be reshaped in response to the overall the “globalization” of art history or not has been going on for decades within every art history program in the country.

Dushko Petrovich, Professor at Boston University and Rhode Island School of Design and lecturer in painting/printmaking at Yale, points it out that although art history maintained an “overwhelmingly European focus” since it had been established in Europe in the middle of the 19th century, the earliest survey texts were not focused exclusively on the West. He refers to the essay “Origins of the Art History Survey Text” by Mitchell Schwarzer, Professor of Visual Studies at California College of the Arts, and a historian of architecture, landscape, and urbanism. According to Schwarzer, many of the discipline’s foundational tomes were decidedly global. Franz Kugler’s Handbook of Art History, published in Germany in 1842, declared itself the first comprehensive book on the subject and had geographic span to match. Debuting a year later, Karl Schnaase’s eight-volume History of the Fine Arts argued that belief systems inherited across cultures were key to understanding any civilization’s artworks, and Anton Heinrich Springer’s detail-oriented studies emphasized the inclusion of all peoples as an organizing principle.

However, art from beyond the West – Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas – were presented in the books as Schwarzer put it, as “foundation stones for the development of higher forms of artistic expression in Europe.” Wishing to establish hierarchies of achievement among nations, early art historians settled on ancient Greece and medieval Germany as the highest points on this vast timeline. The connection between classical and Renaissance culture laid the foundation for the subsequent high point: modern Europe. After this, Schwarzer writes, “non-European art was almost completely excluded from the later and crucial stages of art historical development.”

What we see happening today is in fact an attempt to rethink this traditional approach to art history and re-educate ourselves. Due to the civil rights and the women’s movements and the subsequent shift in students demographics, art history as discipline is moving on too. In 1995, Mark Miller Graham, a historian of Mesoamerican art, wrote in “Rethinking the Introductory Art History Survey” issue of Art Journal, “I don’t think that there is now any justification for confining the introductory courses in art history to the art of the West.”

Petrovich welcomes the shift that is ongoing in Yale and the universities in the country. He passes an opinion that thematic courses (such as Yale’s four new aforementioned offerings) “reach across geography and chronology without any claim of comprehensiveness or canonicity”, thus doing a “fair job of summarizing the variations that are possible with this approach, where ideas, materials, trade routes, or social uses of art can all be used to narrate an introduction to the field.”

He also mentions that as few faculty have the expertise to teach a truly global class on their own, a common solution will most likely be “team-teaching,” with several voices replacing the “old man tells you everything you need to know” model of teaching, as critic and former art historian Aruna D’Souza put it.

Denying the influence of Western art would surely mean dismissing its great truth and beauty. Still, the truth is there has never been just one story of the history of art, but rather a host of narratives surrounding the history of engagement with art, architecture, images and objects across time and place. There is every reason to believe that and the art history surveys that we will see in the future will most likely offer students a variety of voices that will educate them on the topics the generations of their predecessors were ignorant of.

Educators would like to believe that their classroom is a place for students to put away their usual routines and mundane thoughts and settle into the joy of learning. The sad-but-true reality, however, is students being carried away from the educational content with distractions of all kinds. With modern life bringing new opportunities to get distracted by every day, is that possible to fight distraction?

Today, higher education instructors are teaching in an atmosphere that could be described as the “age of distraction”, or a “culture of distraction”. A typical classroom in a university or college is literally fraught with opportunities for distractions that challenge learners’ attention and focus and influence their abilities to process course information, more often than not in a negative way.

Our cognitive processing capacity is limited, which is especially noticeable when difficult content is presented through poor instruction or when peers distract us from the learning process. Larger part of the discussion surrounding distracted students these days tends to focus on the “technology in the classroom” debate. Those who are opposed to the use of laptops and phones in the classroom often argue that today’s students get more distracted than their predecessors from the times when devices were not present in the education process. However, according to James M. Lang, Professor of English at Assumption University in Worcester, MA, and the author of the book Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It, the history is not so straightforward in this regard. In his book, he not only gives an overview of philosophers and writers complaining about the distractibility of their minds going back as far as Aristotle but also considers the work of biologists and psychologists who explain why we have our distractible minds.

To cut it short, “our devices did not create our distractible brains; our brains have always been distractible”. What is indeed changed is that our devices have become especially effective at drawing our attention away from learning of whatever else cognitive activity. The explanation lies in the fact that our brains are very attentive to novelty, and our phones offer us “an endless buffet of novelty,” from the weather and directions to social media accounts and email.

Still, technology is just one of the many classroom distractions that might hamper students’ engagement. A recent study reveals that certain instructor and peer behaviors were equally distracting and had similar negative influences on students’ cognitive load. The participants of the research claimed that they were often distracted because of incompetence, offensiveness or poor class management of the instructor. The examples include instances where teachers said or did something that had irritated or demotivated them, when Power Point slides were flicked through in too fast a pace or when an instructor played music in the background during a group project. They also found distracting their peers misbehaviours – such as asking questions that seemed completely unrelated to the class material presented in class that day, fellow-students coming in after the class has begun or even talking too loudly during the lecture. What is even more interesting, students were easily able to recall specific days, events, and people who they found distracting. The ease with which they could recall these instances speaks to the level of distraction that occurred – it was memorable for students even when students could not recall important course content.

This finding, together with the idea of the human brain as an eminently distractible organ, suggests that a battle with possible distractions that interfere with learning would be imminently a losing one. Instead, Lang advises, educators should focus on cultivating and sustaining attention in the classroom. “Attention is an achievement, not something we should take for granted,” he writes. “Since learning depends upon attention, it should have a prominent place in the way in which we think about our courses and classrooms.”

The study Peers and Instructors as Sources of Distraction from a Cognitive Load Perspective echoes this opinion revealing that students are more easily distracted by technology when overwhelmed by information (or when the information is presented by the instructor in a confusing way), the class is too easy, or the instructor is not involved or relating to students. It makes it hard to escape a conclusion that inadequate teaching and lecture skills, ineffective presentations, as well as going off topic, irrelevant self-disclosing or using humor, seem to be the pressing topic that should be addressed by those wishing to cultivate attention in the class.

One of the strategies for sustaining attention that some teachers intuitively employ is putting structure to any classroom session, as playwrights do in the form of acts and scenes and intermissions. Such “pattern teaching”, a term introduced by Dr. Christine Tulley, Professor of English at The University of Findlay to describe a modular classroom experience in which the instructor deliberately shifts between different modes of engagement (active and passive; individual and group; speaking, writing, and thinking), might really help hold the attention of students over an extended period of time.

The global switch to remote learning as a response to coronavirus pandemic has brought a new dimension to the task of staying focused doing cognitive work, with more instruction delivered virtually or in a hybrid format. When learning comes mediated through screens, fighting distraction can be more challenging, especially when the course content is difficult to process. The core challenge remains the same: our readily distracted brain is tempted to escape from the learning session, and during a Zoom session in a home environment switching for another task could be done with a single click.

Even if the educator is mixing teaching strategies, the generic suite of teaching activities remains more or less the same. Eventually, they become routine enough, so that students check in to class – in person or online – physically, but their minds are somewhere else. To avoid routine and familiarity deadening the attention, educators deploy what Lang calls “signature attention activities” to break the monotony and “wake students from their educational sleepwalking”.

The very word ‘distraction’ has Latin roots: dis  stands for apart, while trahere  means to drag. There are numerous things in the world – from devices close at hand to concerns and fears about the global economic and political upheavals – that can pull our mind in many different directions. In this diverse environment, the classroom could be a perfect opportunity to push worries an anxieties aside in order to focus on something fascinating. Mastery of knowledge or search for solutions could offer us a welcome rest from the kaleidoscope of the modern world’s distractions.