Digital Tools and Physical Objects: Connecting Museums, Teaching, and Scholarship through Art History Teaching Resources

Renee McGarry (Sotheby’s Institute of Art) and Michelle Millar Fisher (Museum of Modern Art)

This presentation will highlight specific entries on the AHTR Weekly blog and in our lesson plan project that have bridged the divide between academic art history, museums, and K-12 classrooms. These include entries on the AHTR Weekly concerning one of the largest Art + Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thons in the country and how the same principles were applied in a classroom, the differences between mentoring for those teaching in museums and those teaching in the university, the connections between lesson plans about the Near East and Islam and contemporary violence committed by ISIS, and the suggestions made by the College Board to revitalize AP art history and how they can be applied to higher education. We will end by discussing how the relationship between AHTR and its recently launched online open access journal, Art History Pedagogy and Practice, can serve as a means of connecting museum education, teaching, and scholarship further by offering a means by which the majority of academic labor, as seen through the lens of the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL), can be taken seriously in university systems and beyond.

Renee McGarry is a contributing editor at Art History Teaching Resources, an open educational resource for art history teachers, and a managing editor at Art History Pedagogy and Practice, the first peer reviewed, open access online journal dedicated to the scholarship of teaching and learning in art history. She is also the senior instructional designer at Sotheby’s Institute of Art.

Michelle Millar Fisher co-founded Art History Teaching Resources (AHTR) with Professor Karen Shelby when she was a graduate teaching fellow at Baruch College, CUNY. She is currently a curatorial assistant in architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art and a doctoral candidate at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She has taught at numerous New York City institutions and previously served as the Associate Manager of Education at the Guggenheim Museum. Michelle serves as an editorial collective member at Art History Pedagogy and Practice.