Teaching Art History with New Technologies: Reflections and Case Studies
Editor: Kelly Donahue-Wallace, Laetitia La Follette and Andrea Pappas
Date Of Publication: Feb 2008
Isbn13: 9781847184542
Isbn: 1-84718-454-5
Digital images, Internet resources, presentation and social software, interactive animation, and other new technologies offer a host of new possibilities for art history instruction. Teaching Art History with New Technologies: Reflections and Case Studies assists faculty in negotiating the digital teaching terrain. The text documents the history of computer-mediated art history instruction in the last decade and provides an analysis of the increasing number of tools now at the disposal of art historians. It presents a series of reflections and case-studies by early adopters who have not just replaced older materials with new, but who have advanced the discipline's pedagogy in doing so. The essays illustrate how new technologies are changing the way art history is taught, summarize lessons learned, and identify challenges that remain. Given the transitional state of the field, with faculty ranging from the computer-phobic to the computer-savvy, these case studies represent a broad spectrum, from those that focus on the thoughtful integration of new technologies into traditional teaching to others that look beyond the familiar art history lecture or seminar format. They provide both practical suggestions and theoretical models for historians of art and visual culture interested in what computer-mediated applications have been successful in art history teaching and where such new approaches may be leading us.

Kelly Donahue-Wallace is the author of Art and Architecture of Viceregal Latin Amerca, 1521-1821. She has also published articles on Mexican colonial printmaking and art history pedagogy and technology.

Dr.Donahue-Wallace has written two successful online art history courses and many interactive learning objects.

Laetitia La Follette is an authority on the physical culture of the ancient Mediterranean. Her research and publications address Roman architectural history, epigraphy and costume. Dr. La Follette was the director of "A History of Art for the 21st Century," a collaborative venture between the University of Massachusetts Amherst and five other colleges funded by the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education.

Andrea Pappas has written for exhibitions of post-World War II art, published on Mark Rothko and Jewish visual culture, and is currently working on a book-length study of the American art market in New York in the mid-twentieth century. Dr. Pappas started teaching with technology in 1995.

This collection of essays describes both current thinking and a series of recent, ambitious endeavors in the field of art history pedagogy. While individual essays on the topic of teaching art history with digital images and/or computer based technologies have been published over the last several years, this book is one of (if not the first) to take on the topic in an explicit and sustained manner.

Strengths of the volume are:

The collection explores substantial practices, ideas and anxieties in the field of art historical pedagogy that are understudied.

The case studies come from a wide range of institutions, tackle very real – and widespread – pedagogical dilemmas and are frank about both their successes and failures.

Questions about resources and funding are treated explicitly throughout.

Several different philosophical positions on art pedagogy are expressed; this diversity represents a good perspective into the field.

The volume successfully describes complex projects in accessible language; it will therefore reach readers who are technologically-savvy as well as those who are technologically-reticent.

In summary, because of its theme, approach and timeliness, this book has the potential to become a model for other work in the field.

Dana Leibsohn

Associate Professor, Art Department, Smith College, MA

Price Uk Gbp: 24.99
Price Us Usd: 37.99

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