After receiving feedback and affecting revisions on our portfolio introduction, my team received the go-ahead to begin our teaching portfolio draft. This draft is essentially a mockup of what the teaching portfolio will be in its final form, similar to those found on the Rollins Museum of Art website. We are using Google Slides to create our draft because of it's ease of use and compatibility with simultaneous remote collaboration, which has been essential to our team's efforts.
Here is a brief look behind the scenes during the making of our portfolio draft:
The first page of the portfolio is the introduction to our theme of revolutionary moments in United States history. This portion explains our main idea and sets up the connections of the selected works to our theme.
Each work in our portfolio has a page to itself where we provide basic information, such as title, artist, medium, and accession numbers. In addition, keywords are also provided which will assist teachers in connecting those works to various topics. A short description of each work and artist is also included to provide context that links the works to our broader theme.
The final component on each page is the inclusion of discussion questions. We have provided questions for K-12 as well as college aged students. These questions will be useful to educators who might use our portfolio in their classroom to connect to their curriculum.
In addition to the expanded information, descriptions, and discussion questions, we have also added a page at the end of the portfolio to list additional works that also could fit into our theme.
We have endeavored to make the portfolio draft as close to the existing RMA teaching portfolios as possible, stylistically speaking. It is our hope that this will reduce any possible distractions from our content.
A challenge we are facing with this project, which I’m sure is quite common in public facing projects, is not only ensuring that our content is accessible and understandable for a broad audience (in this case kindergarteners through upper-level college students), but that it is also concise enough to fit the constraints of the format. I’ve found the hardest part of this project so far is paring down the language used so that all criteria are met, without sacrificing any of the essential context involved in our theme. Knowing how to speak to one’s audience is certainly something that public historians encounter often. This project is an excellent method of practicing that skill. I can only hope that our draft meets with the approval of Dr. Cheong and the Rollins Museum of Art associate curator of education, David Matteson.
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