Intro to Art History for High School IV (Indigenous North and South America)

This class is taught in English.

Students will learn the following things in this course:
--How to talk about and describe art, both verbally and in written form
--The characteristics of art of different movements and cultures
--How to think critically about art and images that are presented to you
--How art fits into a larger historical context and how world events shape art production
--How institutional structures marginalize certain voices within the art historical narrative

I have been teaching art history for seven years now. I started my career teaching at the university level and in museums and have been teaching art history on Outschool since 2018. I developed this introductory series for middle and high schoolers so that they could have a foundation for talking about the arts earlier than at the college level and be exposed to history in a new way! Further, this course is particularly important, as we are covering art and communities that are traditionally ignored by art historical study. I have been studying art history for nearly a decade and want to teach students that there is more to art than European voices. I have taken a large number of courses in my own Graduate studies covering these topics from a decolonized perspective and from experts in the fields of non-Western art historical study. I have a Masters's degree in Art History, where I focused on the exclusionary nature of Art History and use my knowledge of the structure of the discipline to decolonize my approaches for my students. These lectures are adapted from lectures that I taught at the university level. 

Each week, students will respond to questions that correlate with the week's topics in 1-2 paragraphs. There are two larger writing assignments--one visual analysis where the student describes a work of art in detail and one short research paper where the students select an art form from a community we will explore and write a five-paragraph exploration of the art form.

Learner progress is assessed through in-class discussions, online discussions, and written assignments. Grades are available upon request.

50 minutes per week in class, and an estimated 1 - 2 hours per week outside of class.

Students will be provided with outside resources after every class to elaborate on our lessons, available online. Sources used include university lectures, art historical textbooks, including Gardner's Art Through the Ages and Stokstad's Art History, cultural center websites from these regions, and museum information. Whenever possible, information will be pulled from institutions grounded within these areas, to inform the discussion from a decolonized perspective. When available, primary sources from the time period and area are used to include these voices prominently.