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Journal of Museum Education, Volume 32, Number 2, Summer 2007, pp. 155174.
2007 Museum Education Roundtable. All rights reserved. 155
156 kate raw li ns o n et al .
census, more than a quarter of the districts 400,000 students were born
outside the U.S., and 68 percent of the school children speak a home language
other than English. Of the one hundred largest counties in the nation,
Miami-Dades median household income is among the ten lowest; the large
number of children living below the poverty line face many risk factors and
are likely to have difficulty in school.
These serious circumstances had led Wolfsonian staff members to
develop several visual literacy projects (Artful Truth and Page at a Time) with
students and teachers of the district.2 The Artful Citizenship program
emerged not only from the content of the collection, but also from imple-
mentation experiences and evaluations conducted for these programs.
Artful Citizenship was designed to target critical thinking as well as
visual literacy skills of low-performing third- through fifth-grade students
through the integration of the museums visual material into the teaching of
social studies content.3 The general goals of the three-year intervention were
to (1) empower students to become good citizens by understanding citi-
zenship skills; (2) increase the understanding of art as an agent of social
change; and (3) ultimately increase academic achievement as evidenced
through improved standardized test scores. These goals were to be reached
by increasing student visual literacy and critical thinking skills through the
use of images from The Wolfsonians collection of art and design objects,
which is rich in images addressing social and historical content. The project
was designed as a process that would increase a students ability to identify a
social, personal, or political conflict; analyze the problem in a cultural or his-
torical context; and, ultimately, perhaps even design solutions for the social
issue through artistic response activities that placed the student in the role
of a designer working on socially-focused projects.
The Artful Citizenship curriculum was implemented in three schools
with large numbers of at-risk students struggling academically and receiving
Free and Reduced Price Lunch (FRPL) assistance (see Table 1). The target
schools included: Miami Gardens (91.7 percent of students qualified for
FRPL at the time of the study); Phyllis Ruth Miller (79.2 percent of students
qualified for FRPL); and Fienberg-Fisher (87.2 percent of students qualified
for FRPL). The comparison school, Miami Shores Elementary, had 71.9
percent of students qualifying for FRPL. The program was administered to
select third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade classes in the three treatment schools,
beginning with the third grade in year one (which was the study cohort)
and following those students to fourth grade and then fifth. Although
158 kate raw li ns o n et al .
Table 1
approximately 1,200 received the curriculum over the three years, the final
number of students who composed the study sample was 189.
The distance of the three schools from the museums front door ranged
from three blocks to twenty-three miles: from South Miami Beach and its
stimulating business and Art Deco-styled residential district, to a somewhat
run-down residential neighborhood ten miles away on the mainland, to an
isolated neighborhood from which one student did not recognize the At-
lantic Ocean when he saw it during the projects culminating museum visit.
We designed Artful Citizenship to improve the critical thinking and visual
literacy skills of the students inside these schools, since multiple museum visits
were impossible. Our project teamconsisting of four Wolfsonian educators,
Philip Yenawine from Visual Understanding in Education, and a core group of
four MDCPS teachers serving as curriculum advisorsdedicated three years to
developing and field-testing the curriculum. Both formative and summative
evaluation, provided by the Tallahassee-based evaluation team of Curva and
Associates, were critical to understanding the longitudinal impact of the arts-
integrated social studies curriculum. Vital feedback during the three-year
study was also provided by eighty classroom and art teachers who took on the
responsibility of teaching the curriculum in their classrooms.
lthough both methods are useful tools for illuminating the social content
A
of an art object or an artifact, two major issuesdevelopmental appropri-
ateness and teacher implementationas well as other qualities led us to choose
VTS as a visual literacy strategy for Artful Citizenship. VTS provided the vehicle
for building fundamental visual literacy skills, foundational for additional
student-centered teaching and learning methods implemented in the project.
The methods used in combination promoted student engagement with visual
materials in a variety of modes: viewing, reflecting, and talking about visual
images, as well as reading, writing, and responding artistically.
To support teachers as they learned to facilitate VTS discussions, a series
of professional development training sessions were conducted at the museum
by Philip Yenawine. Additionally, Wolfsonian education staff conducted
weekly in-school coaching and debriefings with teachers as they began to im-
plement VTS with their students. In the three-year period, approximately 200
school visits were made by museum staff. Two week-long teacher institutes
were also held during the summers of 2003 and 2004 for project teachers,
taught by Wolfsonian education staff, Philip Yenawine, and two faculty
members from Florida International Universitys College of Education. These
workshops provided in-depth exploration of learning theory, VTS theory and
practice, language arts and social studies curriculum connections, and close
study of the Artful Citizenship curriculum materials and methods.
workbook format with students greatly eased time and material limitations
that teachers had experienced in their classrooms in year one and modeled a
multimodal arts integration curriculum for them.
The student journey was tied directly to established social studies
content for third, fourth, and fifth grades, expanding in scope and complexity
as children matured over the three years. In careful sequence, legs of the journey
addressed: (1) concepts of personal identity within the immediate or larger
communities (the concept of community changed over grade levels from
home to school to cultural group to state to nation); (2) the changing roles of
citizens to make a community work, whether it is a home or school or city,
etc.; and (3) building a geographical understanding of a childs expanding
world. The conceptual focus for each leg was implicit in their respective titles,
posed as three open-ended questions: Who am I? What is a community? Where am
I? The final and fourth section of the workbook focused on artistic response to
the previous three legs and was called Art in Action.
Each of the legs of the journey began with a visual literacy lesson (called
Look & Think), which used the VTS methodology to explore three themat-
ically linked images; this was followed by a drawing activity (Sketch Away) and
then a writing activity (Write On!) related to those images. These in turn were
followed by a vocabulary activity (Local Lingo) connected to the upcoming
social studies lesson (Dig Deeper). In order to also build students visual vo-
cabulary, these sections culminated in a lesson that engaged them in ex-
ploring symbols (Symbol Quest), which might be completed in the classroom
or art studio as the teachers preferred.
Although the use of a workbook may seem antithetical to the open-ended
philosophy of VTS, it provided a much-needed model for teachers to learn to
integrate visual materials and the VTS methodology into classroom practice.
Teachers began each lesson unit with an open-ended discussion, drawing out
the prior knowledge of the student and engaging them in the discovery of in-
herent social studies content through three specially selected visual images.
They then followed up the VTS Look & Think activity on a subsequent day
with the drawing and writing activities, which further addressed the theme of
the previous days images and prompted the student to create a personal re-
sponse to the theme. Most important, these responsive activities also provided
a transitional bridge from the open-ended discussion to the more directed vo-
cabulary and social studies content in the following lessons.
The visually stimulating workbooks proved to be user-friendly for both
teachers and students and were designed to not only deliver information, but
162 kate raw li ns o n et al .
also to allow for student ownership and a place for them to record their
personal responses. For example, at the end of each leg, My Pages provided a
place for students to sketch or write as they wished. As reported in teacher in-
terviews, for many, the Artful Citizenship materials replaced time-intensive
and developmentally inappropriate social studies textbooks and became the
only social studies lessons students received. Teachers commented that
students were more engaged by the visually-appealing workbook and VTS dis-
cussions than other classroom activities, and these provided them with a
much-needed learning break from the intensive, rote test prep they were re-
quired to conduct.
Figure 1: Mural Study Boys Playing Marbles for Cycle of a Womans Life for the Womens
House of Detention, Manhattan (c. 1936) by Lucienne Bloch, WPA Federal Art Project.
Courtesy of The Wolfsonian-Florida International University, The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection.
Collection fidelity. The nature of the Wolfsonian collection, with its em-
phasis on design and propaganda of the 18501945 period, was the original
source of ideas for the project. Because of the nature of the collection, the
aim of Artful Citizenship was to use inquiry-based strategies that focused on
the critical understanding of objects as agents of social change (as opposed
to understanding their aesthetic or art-historical significance).
Visual appeal and image variety. Many of the basic principles suggested in
VTS image-selection guidelines matched our own selection criteria.6 For example,
it was important that the images be narrative and the subjects interesting to
eight- to eleven-year-olds. Images depicting children involved in family or other
social activities were especially appealing, as were beautifully illustrated maps
that explored the fauna and flora of the Pacific Rim, playful illustrations of local
products, and services with cartoon-like drawings (see Figure 1). Equally, the
164 kate raw li ns o n et al .
image needed immediate visual appealengaging design, color, and use of ma-
terials, techniques, or compositional elements such as point of view.
Implicit in developmentally appropriate, student-centered images for el-
ementary students is a high degree of readability. Although students may
not understand everything depicted or understand the historical context of
the image, most would be able to identify the elements of the image and be
able to discuss what may be happening. Images that allow students to build
on their prior knowledge challenge them to look further and think more,
and images that make connections to possible social content provide the
best growth opportunities.
longitudinal study.7 The design for our assessment evolved over a four-year
period of studying the impact of our programs on visual literacy skills in el-
ementary classrooms.8
The primary question guiding this study was to determine if partici-
pation in the Artful Citizenship program affected the students ability to
interpret visual images and think critically about them and the social issues
they convey. Because the visual literacy project was embedded in social
studies standards, however, so too were the standards of assessment. To
define and evaluate visual thinking in the context of social studies, we used
a specialized rubric that had been developed in prior Wolfsonian studies.
The rubric evolved from close analysis of thousands of student responses,
all captured in writing before and after VTS lessons were conducted, al-
166 kate raw li ns o n et al .
Figure 3: Page 38 from The Story of Alaska (c. 1940) illustrated by Cornelius Hugh De
Witt, text by Clara (Breakey) Lambert, and published by Harper & Brothers, London.
Courtesy of The WolfsonianFlorida International University, The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr.
Collection.
categories ensured that trained readers would not be tempted to use a middle
number as a compromise score and seemed essential for determining growth
over time, from the pre-test to the post-test, as students would ultimately be
compared to their own earlier work. In other words, students who scored low
initially (a one, two, or even three rating) should show improvement
even though they still may not achieve high levels of competency (i.e., a one
might become a two).
The four performance domains of visual literacy and critical thinking
were defined in the rubric: description, animation (describing the action
taking place), analysis, and interpretation. These performance domains were
informed by Benjamin Blooms Taxonomy, and the indicators in these
domains moved from the lowest-level ability to describe literal elements in the
visual image, to higher levels of visual skill encompassing the ability to connect
elements, analyze context and an artists intent, and ultimately evaluate the
success of a work.9 Critical thinking was folded into the visual literacy scale
and defined as a process of increasing complexity beginning with the ability
to identify a social, personal, or political conflict, moving to analysis of the
problem in a cultural or historical context, and, ultimately, perhaps including
the ability to even design solutions for the social issue.
Students at the three participating schools, as well as students in the
fourth comparison school, were assessed twice a year, beginning prior to the
program as third graders and ending at the completion of the program as
sixth graders, for a total of six times.
Using the VTS protocol (Whats going on in this picture? What do you
see that makes you say that? What more can you find?), students were asked
to respond in writing to a work of art reflecting social issues from The Wolf-
sonian collection. Although the works selected for the pre- and post-as-
sessments were not identical, they were selected to be parallel prompts
differing at each grade level.
For example, at the third-grade level, one image depicted a barn fire and the
other seemed to be farm workers laboring in a hay field. Both featured male
figures hard at work; both represented a family group gathered together for a
common purpose; both suggested potential social, political, or personal issues.
At the fourth-grade level, one image depicted a crowded bus or subway
(see Figure 4) and the other represented a solitary figure and three twisted,
leafless trees on a barren foreground contrasted against a glowing city skyline.
Again, both images suggest social issues, related to urban life, for example, or
race, class, and progress.
Artful Citizenship Visual/Critical Literacy Scoring Rubric
168
6 5 4 3 2 1
Sophisticated Accomplished Proficient Literal Developing Limited
Description Includes rich Describes visual Describes identified Describes particular Identifies two or more Blank or illegible
description of visual elements in detail visual elements elements elements Lacks detail
elements May identify social, May name a conflict May label visual May randomly list May be off topic
Describes a conflict or personal, or political or a problem traits (such as shape, elements
May be inaccurate
problem conflicts symbols, structural
details)
Animation Connects animation Makes inferences May ascribe complex Attributes actions to May attribute some Provides little or no
to a more complex about features of actions, i.e. emotion characters actions to characters evidence
kate raw li ns o n et al .
Figure 4: Painting, Subway (c. 1935), by Daniel Ralph Celentano. Courtesy of The Wolf-
sonianFlorida International University, The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection.
Figure 5: Mural study, John Brown (c. 1930-1939), by Stuyvesant Van Veen, possibly for
the War Department Building, Washington, D.C. Courtesy of The WolfsonianFlorida In-
ternational University, The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection.
t h i n ki n g c ritical ly ab o ut s o cial issues 171
I see people going on a subway because the adults have to go to their jobs. This
is after Martin Luther King because Blacks are with Whites. I also see a child
and her mother going to church because the child has a book in her hand. I also
see some of the men reading a newspaper about their country or state. And last
I see worried faces on some of the women or men because something bad is
happening that is read in the newspaper. Another thing I see is that out of the
window it looks like it is raining and there is a flood which is why some of the
men and women are worried. But some other people think it will be over soon.
And last I see an old man talking to the womans daughter saying that nothing
bad will happen.
Conclusion
Museum collections contain artifacts of change, reflecting the aesthetic and
social values of the past and present. They include a vast number of indi-
vidual objects that address larger issues and offer endless opportunities for
exploring social, technological, and political topics. This richness of visual
material, thematically and historically, affords the ideal context for engaging
young learners in authentic conversations. Projects such as Artful Citizenship
provide a model for using this abundant resource. In this case a model arts-
in-social-studies curriculum was designed for use by classroom teachers,
which embraced open-ended collaborative discussion to foster critical and
creative thought about important social issues, much needed as we continue
into the 21st century.
Notes
1. Gail Anderson, Museums and Relevancy, Journal of Museum Education 31, no. 1 (Spring
2006): 3.
2. Fely Curva, Sande Milton, and Susan Nelson Wood, Program Evaluation Report for
Artful Truth: Healthy Propaganda Arts Project (report, Curva and Associates, Inc., Tal-
lahassee, FL, 2001; Fely Curva and Sande Milton, Program Evaluation Report, A Page at
a Time Program (report, Curva and Associates, Inc., Tallahassee, FL, 2004).
3. Florida Department of Education, Sunshine State Standards, http://www.firn.edu/
doe/curric/prek12/pdf/socstud3.pdf (accessed January 28, 2007).
4. Abigail Housen and Philip Yenawine, Visual Thinking Strategies (New York: Visual Under-
standing in Education, 2000); Paul E. Bolin, Art and Artifacts: The Value of Material
Culture Studies for Art Education, The Pennsylvania Art Educator 2 (1993): 1518.
5. Curva, Milton, and Wood, Program Evaluation Report for Artful Truth; Curva and
Milton, Program Evaluation Report, A Page at a Time Program.
6. Philip Yenawine, Jump Starting Visual Literacy: Thoughts on Image Selection, Art Edu-
cation, (2003): 612.
7. Louise Rosenblatt, Literature as Exploration, 5th ed. (New York: Modern Language Associa-
tion, 1996).
8. Curva, Milton, and Wood, Program Evaluation Report for Artful Truth; Curva and
Milton, Program Evaluation Report, A Page at a Time Program.
9. Benjamin S. Bloom, Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Handbook I: Cognitive Domain. (New
York: Addison Wesley Publishing Co., 1956).
Kate Rawlinson has been the assistant director for Education and Public Programs
at The WolfsonianFlorida International University for the past seven years.
174 kate raw li ns o n et al .