In the spring of 2023, Bethany alumnus and artist Charis Carmichael Braun was recruited to teach the Art History III: Modernism course at Bethany Lutheran College–from all the way in New York. Professor Braun used a wide variety of resources to give students a rich learning environment without a physical classroom.

Professor Braun started the semester with one-on-one Zoom calls with the students to get to know them. Later in the semester she had open office hours for Zoom check-ins with the students to see how they were getting along. If students had questions, they could either reach out to her individually or post to a public Questions forum on Moodle if it was something that other students could benefit as well.

The students purchased a subscription to Pearson’s online textbook copy of H. H. Arnason’s History of Modern Art. The e-textbook has tools for highlights, notes, and flashcards. It also in theory has an audiobook function, but the robotic voice is hard to listen to. So, in order to make reading the content more engaging, Professor Braun decided to record her own readings of the text, interspersed with expansions and applications. She made these videos available on her YouTube channel:

Periodically, the class would have an art attribution quiz based on the artworks covered by the textbook/videos. Students needed to match the artist and art movement to the artwork using a word bank. Since there was a lot of ground to cover and not all of it was in order by art movement, I made a slideshow that specifically listed the names and art movements in the notes section, so that students could use the slides like flashcards to study:

The activities on Moodle were separated by DO assignments, which would be graded, and other categories of DISCOVER, LOOK, BONUS, and FUN, which weren’t graded but were encouraged for extensions and to show participation. These were mostly links to further resources on the topic. There were also some extra credit assignments for the Minneapolis Institute of Art field trip and lectures by professor emeritus Bukowski.

The DO assignments included deep discussion questions such as “Which holds more truth in it, painting or photography?” and the students’ chosen response to the weekly reading (inspired by Jason Jaspersen’s approach to art history assignments). Options for these responses could include a written summary, a master-copy of an artwork, a poem, a video, or some other project. Students also wrote essays reflecting on art lectures we attended at Bethany that semester.

As is often the case, there ended up being a lot of content left near the end of the semester, so to cover more ground Professor Braun had the students teach each other by creating their own slideshow on an art movement or artist. Here is mine:

Rather than dealing with the complications of setting up a way to present them to the class, the slideshows were posted as pdfs for students to peruse on their own time. They then had to respond to their peers with constructive feedback to show that they had read it.

In place of an exam, students worked on a cumulative paper or project summarizing what they had learned, such as the following:

This class was a goldmine of authentic experiences, despite being completely digital. I never felt unsupported or out of sync, because Professor Braun made an effort to get to know all of her students and promised to work with our schedules. The only challenging part was being self-motivated for the art lecture papers, which were due 5 days after attendance–but we could do them on any art lecture that semester, so it was easy to put it off until the next one. Overall, the pace of the course was manageable, and I felt like I came out of this course with a stronger knowledge of art history.

What tools have you found most useful for online learning?

How do you keep up student motivation for online classes?

The first day of Art History II: Renaissance to Realism at Bethany Lutheran College, I and the other students were greeted not with a syllabus and a 7-pound Janson’s A History of Art, but with a letter.

Dear Art History student,

Writing a syllabus makes me grumpy and nervous. … So how about I write you a letter?

… There’s a lot to cover and we just won’t. Your life is complicated, my life is complicated, and the lives of great artists of the past were also complicated. That’s an important theme to consider. So we may or may not examine certain artworks in this semester, but no matter what, there will be mountains more to learn and understand.

… The artists we will study took their turn. They didn’t know that they were hundreds of years in the past. They were living in a sparkling present just like us. We study their work because they navigated through the obstacle course of every day and successfully pulled off some of the most moving, insightful, complex, layered reports of “being human” in recorded history. Generations have tested these artworks. Do they still feel true? It’s your turn to try them on for size.

… Will we cover the right stuff? Not sure. We might end up in surprising places. We might miss something important. We might find something really interesting. … We’ll learn about art history AND I think we’ll learn about how to find that information. It’s still a fantastic idea to buy “History of Art” by HW Janson, but I think you should by all the art books.

… I’ll entertain your suggestions. The whole point of quizzes, tests, papers, and projects is for you to assure the instructor that you weren’t sleeping. How would you like to express your understanding of art history? I thought about requiring everyone to create their own textbook. That’s still a great idea. You could write a great paper. … Would you consider learning fresco or egg tempera? I believe that people do their best work when they care about their work. So you tell me. When? How? Your call.

… Please don’t think I’m flippant about all this. I do take this seriously. I’m excited to engage in real exploration of this rich content with a group of one-of-a-kind individuals. My approach welcomes surprise twists and personalization. Customize your education!

Cordially,

Jason Jaspersen

Professor Jaspersen, who has a Master’s degree in Experiential Education, went on to say that traditional education is like a show dog–you’re preparing for a one-off performance of what you’ve learned. Their training is regimented and predictable. But project-based education is more like a stinky, mangy dog running wild, drinking the swamp water.

In that spirit, his vision for this class was that we would choose our own adventure for a final project. Every week we submitted portions of our project or progress reports, showing evidence that we had learned something from the lecture and discussion that week, all building up to our final project due exam week.

If there’s no textbook, how do you learn art history? For most days, Professor Jaspersen would put on a Prezi presentation on an artist from the era we were studying with very minimal words—just the name of the artist, some dates, and the titles of the artworks. He would zoom in close to the art, letting us absorb the details silently and then quietly ask us to shout out our observations. We had practiced the difference between formal analysis and narrative content to go from what we saw to what we interpreted, and by the end of the semester many of us grew more confident in speaking loud enough for the room to hear with whatever we noticed.

Professor Jaspersen would leapfrog from our observations to give us context on the artist and his era, expounding on the greater impact of these artworks. While there weren’t words projected and we weren’t going to be tested on these facts, we would often write down these pieces of wisdom to give direction to our projects or simply to absorb for our own information.

We didn’t just look at Prezi slides, either.

In the first few days, we made a field trip to the college library to do a library-sponsored scavenger hunt to learn how to scan shelves, and then we were assigned to find “The most beautiful art book in the library” and bring to class to talk about it.

Another day we added to a class Jamboard slideshow, using different colored “sticky notes” to indicate formal observations, narrative content, and historical context. We also created art memes based on artworks we had studied.

We often looked at artworks in context through Google Earth, high resolution art museum scans, and SmartHistory videos. Though this year it didn’t work out to make it to the art museum in Minneapolis, we did do a tour of some of the artworks on campus.

When we checked in about how our final project was going, Professor Jaspersen would give us creative exit ticket prompts to write on index cards. One day we wrote our dreams for our projects in increasing scope, throwing our grandest ideas into the center as crumpled up balls that he would pick up and read anonymously.

Somewhere 3/4 in Professor Jaspersen confessed that he felt that we weren’t going to make it through all the content. He admitted that he was mostly trusting us to do our weekly assignments without following up as closely as he could have, because of his other responsibilities. One day he even waltzed in with sprigs of lavender half an hour after class started, saying, “I was being a good teacher–I was working on the art lecture. I just lost track of time and didn’t show up.”

But in the end it didn’t matter. We learned how to truly look at art, and applied what we had learned to projects that were personally interesting to us. We may have been guinea pigs to an experiential class, but that didn’t make what we had learned any less significant.

What are some nontraditional education methods you have used in the past?

Engaging with Artwork through Humor

One of the challenges of teaching art history is how to get students to really look at art, and how to measure and assess their discoveries. The irreverence of memes can provide a gateway for students to notice things in the artwork that they might not have seen otherwise. This can lead to discussions on artist choice and cultural context.

In Art History II at Bethany Lutheran College, Professor Jason Jaspersen had his students choose an artwork from the Late Medieval period to turn into a meme. Students could use whatever programs they wished; the only requirement was some sort of text overlay.

As we learned in that class, simply listening and taking notes isn’t enough—to truly learn something, you need to reflect, apply, reframe, or recreate the information. You can do that by explaining it to someone (The Phone Call), juxtaposing it with something else (The Mix), or creating something new inspired by it (The Replica). A meme would probably fall under The Mix, but you could also create a more informative textual overlay of the artwork.

This could be an opportunity to explore memes and Internet comics as an art form—it’s not unlikely that your digital artists may create webcomics someday, and it would be inspiring to explore how it has shaped our culture.

The concern may come up that students could uncover more disturbing images as they scour the Internet for cringe-y artwork, so depending on their level you may want to limit it to specific pieces or use an online gallery that you’ve already previewed.

It may also be a good idea for students to disclose which artwork they used in their meme, in case the class wants to look at the artwork in context. It’s also just good practice to cite the source, though memes and educational use generally can get by with using copyrighted images. If students are shy about sharing their memes (humor is a vulnerable thing to create and not everyone has the same sense of humor), you could display them anonymously with the class.

Any piece of art from any art period could lend itself to memes—but the more you meme an artwork, the less viewers are able to truly see it for itself. Famous artworks such as the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper especially suffer from this veil. For this reason I wouldn’t overuse this assignment, even though it’s easy to assign and grade as a pass/fail.

What ideas do you have about using memes in the art classroom?

Have you had students create memes? How did it go?