Our Rollins Museum of Art Teaching Portfolio project proposal was generally well received and was approved by David Matteson, Associate Curator of Education at RMA. Mr. Matteson did have some feedback to share with us including that we should aim to be "specific about the teachable aspects of revolutionary moments” and well as that we highlight why it is important and/or valuable to study elements of revolutions. Moving forward with the project, our group has taken these ideas to heart in drafting our next deliverable for the project, an introduction to the theme and a checklist of works that we feel would properly encapsulate that theme in a teaching portfolio to be used in not only Rollins College classrooms, but also potentially in K-12 programing as well. This of course brings up several interesting challenges for us, as the theme of revolutionary moments can run the gamut from patriotic pride in our national foundation stories to hotly debated current events that some may feel certain levels of discomfort interacting with. This is particularly relevant in gearing our portfolio toward a wide enough audience that would make it wholly appropriate for kindergarten age students while at the same time keeping the content valuable for those taking upper-level college coursework.
Because we aim to guide our audience through the revolutionary moments that we have chosen to highlight, we decided that it would be best to do so in a reverse chronological order. This should allow the audience to personally relate to the most recent works in the portfolio with their own personal experiences and then continue backwards through time as they discover context from previous movements that can be illustrated to have connections to other movements.
An example of these contextual connections can be seen between the following three works:
Beginning with Racism Doesn’t Rest During a Pandemic Pee Chee (No Justice No Peace) by Patrick Martinez, the viewer can relate to the Black Lives Matter movement as a recent movement that they may have more first-hand knowledge of. Then as they move back temporally through the portfolio, a connection can be made to Emory Douglas’s Only on the Bones of the Oppressors can the People Freedom Be Found which portrays the intense emotional struggle of the Black Power movement. Finally, Uprising by Arthur B. Davies can provide a background moment in relation to many movements, but in particular in relation to the other two pieces it can support the idea of the struggle of Black Americans to rise from oppression.
Click here to read our team's formal introduction and checklist.
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