Open Art Histories (OAH) is a platform for art, art history, visual art, architecture, communication, and museum studies teachers and instructors in Canada. Our goal is to build a generative and supportive network for addressing the pressing pedagogical challenges confronting these fields, including globalizing art history, teaching English-as-an-additional-language students, decolonizing the discipline and classroom, and advancing accessibility and inclusion. This collaborative workshop explores how we might adapt our pedagogical practices to best represent a field in flux, one that is no longer bound by a single historical narrative or set of objects? What approaches or tools might we develop or adopt to make our increasingly dynamic field accessible to the increasingly diverse students in our classrooms? How can open access, online resources, and new technologies, which have dramatically transformed the way both text and object are encountered, shape course content and delivery, while providing dynamic, tangible, and sustainable outcomes for students? Participants will consider the challenges in teaching visual and material culture both within the discipline of art history and beyond as a way to order and reimagine, reinvigorate, reinvent, and reshape the teaching of the discipline for our times.
Learning Outcomes: At the end of this session, participants will be able to: identify the challenges in teaching visual and material cultures in the 21st century; make connections between the challenges and pedagogical tools (resources, programs, apps) currently available; and, envision ethical and sustainable open educational practices in their own teaching and curriculum.
Department Chair, Snəw̓eyəɬ leləm̓ Langara College
Alena Buis is an Instructor and Chair of the Department of Art History and Religious Studies at snəw̓eyəɬ leləm̓-Langara College in Vancouver British Columbia. She has an MA in Canadian Art History from Concordia University (Montreal) and a PhD in Visual and Material Culture from Queen’s University (Kingston). Her recent research focuses on the scholarship of teaching and learning for art history (So-TLAH... Read More →