For years, students have had issues remembering everything they have learned in their classes. Even in higher education, students are faced with large amounts of information to learn.
This higher cognitive load causes challenges to effective learning such as comprehension, retention, and paying attention. Even with long hours studying and cramming, sometimes the information just does not stick. Students need other methods than the ‘traditional’ model of teaching to help them. Thinking about this problem leads to the crucial question:
“How might we make art history more easily understood and accessible for students?”
This is imperative because this problem not only affects students who are learning art history, but also students with learning difficulties and other disabilities who are struggling with learning in the traditional lecture + visual method. This problem will be further explained below.
The problem with traditional teaching is that it does not work for everyone. A lecture combined with showing visuals work for some students, but not all. Here lies the root of the problem. Continuing to teach in this method will continue to create problems for students. Some students find this method boring; others cannot pay attention. If students are bored during lessons or cannot pay attention, they will not put in the effort to learn. Students are overwhelmed by the vast amounts of information they need to memorize, while others simply do not see the information as relevant to their lives, degrees, or even jobs.
To begin solving this problem, the issues of boredom, lack of interest, and difficulties paying attention and comprehending the material had to be addressed. Why was the information boring to some students and not others? What specifically was causing the lack of interest while learning art history? How can I help students comprehend the information better?
The challenges I realized I had to overcome were stopping information from being overwhelming, making information interesting enough to hold students’ attention, making the information easier to comprehend, and helping students understand that the information they are learning is indeed relevant to them.
I have thought about these questions myself as I was an art historian in undergrad and still am in my free time. During my time as I student, I experienced many of these same problems that I have sought out to solve. I was bored during some of the lessons I took, even in my favorite classes. The overwhelming amount of information to memorize was stressful, especially when artist names began to sound similar. Dates were even worse. Many times, I thought to myself, “Is there any way we could have some fun learning this?”
This is why I feel I am the best person to solve this problem. I specialized in art history and had first-hand experience struggling with these problems I want to help students overcome. I also have experience presenting information and teaching papers that I have written at a university-level, so I understand the importance of teaching art history in a way that does not overwhelm people unfamiliar with the information. If not, this would create a gatekeeping situation, inhibiting accessibility.
I originally sought to help both high school and college students as I also thought back to some of the art history that I learned in high school. After consideration and speaking to some of my old university professors—which I will talk more about later—I realized that college students had plenty of problems that needed addressing and that I did not need to include high school students in my focus group. Although high school students may benefit from InfoCademy, juggling two target audiences was more arduous than what I needed from the 15-week timeframe that I had.
When thinking about how to solve the problem of making art history more interesting and more accessible, I had to think about what was preventing this. Then I remembered some of the art history classes I have taken. I remembered a world art history course where the professor droned on and on without any visual aspect to focus on; how his delivery method was dry, monotonous, and was often off-putting when students asked him questions. I remembered being frustrated to tears with stacks and stacks of flashcards trying to cram as many definitions, time periods, and artists into my head for an exam as possible.
How was I supposed to help people with these problems when I, myself, had struggled with them? Then I realized what helped me remember important things: anything entertaining that stuck. For example, even in 2023, I still remember that Michelangelo often drew muscly men because of one quote I read in a book. Leonardo da Vinci had said that his drawings reminded him of sucks of walnuts, meaning they didn’t look good. Or, to make it more relevant to pop culture, Leonardo was “throwing shade at him.” Pop culture! That was what I needed to use. What better way to connect to people and for people to connect to new information than pop culture?
Then I had to think about what the least common denominator about pop culture was. Not everyone watches the same shows or movies or reads the same books. However, nearly everyone understands memes as memes can be edited by numerous different groups of people. Then I thought about what memes brought out in people: laughter. Why not find funny and entertaining videos, then? Lastly, I was thinking about all the flashcards I had to study and subsequently thought about making games that could help people study. Gamifying information.
Meme taken from Tlatollotl on Tumbr: https://tlatollotl.tumblr.com/post/189584704031/huītzilōpōchtli-wikipedia
The result at the end of brainstorming and beginning to plan this project was that I would focus on memes, videos, and games. I had an initial idea of using augmented reality (AR) to allow students to explore sites that they are studying from the comfort of their own homes. Due to the limited time and my lack of technical knowledge about AR, I decided to leave that out for the time being.