Walking It Through: Collaboration and Planning

Carter Glass and Grace VanderVliet

This past fall, the Gallery Educator team at the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA) tasked me with creating a gallery tour for fourth graders focused on writing about art: three stops and three different types of writing.

I spent some time with our collection, developed ideas, and brought them back to the team. While there are many barriers to collaboration—the time commitment involved, the ceding of ownership and control, and the added effort of revision—in the examples that follow, the collaborative process produced lessons that were immediately successful and repeatable in the long term.

As I share the writing activities and how they grew as a result of our team’s collaborative process, my hope is that you will adapt these lessons to your own classroom and collaborate with your colleagues in your planning process.

The Gallery Educator Team at UMMA designs tours through a collaborative process. While individual educators may take the lead in developing a tour, we meet as a group to talk through it and walk through the lesson in the galleries. We approach this as a kind of dress rehearsal. Educators present to one another as if their peers are students. It is a way to refine the wording and presentation of the lesson in real time and space. The lead gallery educator presents a plan, including a central tour theme, artworks chosen for close study, activities, and an introduction, conclusion, and transitions.

My hope is that you will adapt these lessons to your own classroom and collaborate with your colleagues in your planning process.

To prepare for the fourth-grade writing tour, we walked three galleries together, allowing our team to ask questions and refine the plan.

In our talk-through, I explained how in our Japanese gallery, students would incorporate close-looking into their writing. They were to choose and examine an artwork and unravel the ingredients and steps the artist took to create it.

My colleagues were generally excited about this recipe lesson. They had some questions, though. Do fourth graders know what a recipe looks like? Can we incorporate some modelling to set the students up for success?

As we walked the tour, we fleshed out a procedure that made the activity more accessible. We would start by doing a quick example in a whole-group demonstration. The handout would have two columns, with the example in writing on one side and a clear template on the other.

For another tour stop, I planned to visit the large-scale geometric abstract paintings of Carmen Herrera and Leon Polk Smith in our temporary exhibition Both Sides of the Line. Many of their later works contain only a color and a line. Inspired by this simplicity, I imagined students distilling their writing to its most essential elements: they would begin with a short response to the artwork and then boil their words down to just two words and a punctuation mark.

Students view and write short responses to Red Rising by Leon Polk Smith. 

As we talked it over, my colleagues had questions: What writing would they be editing? How would we explain the process? Would there be time to accomplish it?

I began to see how far my plan was from real-life success. The revision activity was a stretch for fourth graders. A team member suggested an activity she had done before in which students look at an artwork and write two words on separate note cards in response. Then, in small groups, they craft a poem with their minimal collection of words.

Students deconstructed their writing about Leon Polk Smithʼs Red Rising to craft a poem.

At the final tour stop, Table Manners, a video installation by Zina Saro-Wiwa, eight separate monitors feature residents of the Niger Delta consuming a local dish as they look directly at the viewer. This was an opportunity for students to connect with a land and culture far from Ann Arbor. I thought a written conversation with the person in the video could help build this connection and another writing skill: dialogue.

My colleagues asked: Would students engage in the kinds of stereotypical viewing the video aims to upend? Do these students know how to write dialogue? Is the handout too boring? It was just lines on paper.

Using my colleaguesʼ suggestions, I made a simple hand-drawn handout with word-bubble graphics. The dialogue began with a simple question from the character in the video, “Where are you?” Students could then build their dialogue from there.

When the tour finally happened, students engaged with the activities. The plan was clear to all our tour guides.

The process of collaboration turned my ideas into fully functioning twenty-minute lessons that put students at the center of their learning. Since then, we have used these activities consistently with subsequent groups. The collaborative process was at times uncomfortable and time-consuming, but ultimately essential.

Carter Glass is a gallery educator at the University of Michigan Museum of Art in Ann Arbor, Michigan. cartergl@umich.edu

Grace VanderVliet is the curator for museum teaching and learning at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. mdegroo@umich.edu