Excursion teaching

We had an excursion to the Regional Arts Gallery and the Library Museum in Albury yesterday. I didn’t even know there was an Art Gallery in Albury. It was really cool. I wish I had known about it earlier, it was a really nice space. There were some cool Tracey Moffatt photographs. Talking to someone else at the end of the day who was pretty critical of the space actually made me more appreciative of it because I had to justify why I thought it was good. Either I’ve only seen crappy art spaces or they’ve seen some amazing ones, but for a gallery in a small country town I was impressed. There was a nice mix of open free space and areas where you could sit and draw or write or play. When we first go there they gave us some time to “acclimatise” – about 5 minutes just to wander around and feel comfortable in the space. The staff explained that they did this so students didn’t find the space threatening and have a chance to calm down and be, rather than be excited and rowdy. They had a team of education officers who explained to us how they run the space. I would have liked to have more time to look around independently, but these are tactics used with school students and we where there to learn about using such community spaces as a teacher rather than look at art. We were sat and were talked at, and one of the staff said she preferred to run less structured activities with students, because students have a chance to get a broader range of experiences out of the visit, even though a more structured visit may have more “cognitive” value. I felt however, that it may have been more beneficial if we had had time to wander around and come up with our own ideas on how to use the space, rather than be spoon-fed others – which weren’t especially amazing anyhoo.

However, at the time, the remark about cognitive versus emotional experiences got me thinking about a paper I was reading for a tut on preparation for early years learning, where the authors were talking about the different social pressures that have arisen in recent years – increased access to and use of drug and alcohol among youth, the replacement of the ‘nuclear’ family by other versions of family life and how we need to be redesigning our curriculum to give students the tools to cope with these pressures. It occurred to me that there has been an increased focus on inter and intra personal skills in schools since I was there, and that if we had had education directed at social skills I would probably be a completely better, more well adjusted person!

Back to the art gallery. They gave us a worksheet (rather structured) whereby we had to write two narrative descriptions of what was happening in two different pictures. I liked it because it made me look at and think about the pictures more closely, but as one of our lecturers pointed out, there was nothing in it that asked for an emotional response – it was all very intellectual. And it was asking for a written [or drawn] response to the work [but the paper was lined so there was nowhere to draw except on the back]. I thin on a once off visit it would have been hard to get a lot out of it using the materials the gallery provided, especially if you were coming from out of town and didn’t have the opportunity to pre-prepare. [have I just invented a new tautological word???]

Then we went over to the library museum. A really nice library with big orange [or were they lime green?] carpeted steps for kids to sit one, but again the [same] staff were supposed to be demonstrating the services they had on offer but didn’t seem to be au fait with. To be frank, the museum was my idea of hell. I found it boring and tedious and I’m a semi-grown adult. Cramped displays in a dark claustrophobic room featuring historical objects. This is the stuff that used to make me think history was deadly boring; museum spaces crammed with objects featuring few descriptions and no stories. The sort of places I always go to overseas and hate, but feel obliged to suffer. Rooms filled with variations on the same theme. The National Museum in Bangkok is an exception. It has informative and interesting guided tours, which walk you through the different stylistic features from different ages and regions. For example, by looking at a Buddha statue, the way the hair is curled the feet designed and the nose shaped, you can tell where and when they are from. The symbolisms of the different poses are also explained, leaving the visitor leaving with a sense of learning – not boredom.

Artefacts are interesting evidence, but the evidence without the stories leaves me cold. We were given a coloured photocopy resource sheet that looked expensively but poorly designed. It merely required students to find things and ill in factual information; but little or no critical thinking was required.