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Creating a Virtual Museum of African Art — Gitti Salami

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Background

Art of Central Africa investigates the indigenous artistic practices of the peoples of Central Africa. In class I focus on a large corpus of art objects, from ancient remains to material collected during the colonial period to indigenous practices that continue today. The course also deals with performance art, e.g., ritual procedures, festival arts, and masquerades. Aside from the goal that students acquire basic knowledge of the artistic repertoire of the major ethnic groups of Central Africa, the basic enduring learning goal revolves around cultural sensitivity towards an "Other." Students should have no doubt about the necessity to approach artworks of an "Other" through a thorough understanding of the cultural context of artistic production.

The subject matter of the course is quite removed from students’ everyday concerns. As a means to spark student’s interest and to draw them in, I designed a web project to provide hands-on experiences with artworks and to cater to students’ savvy and apparent preference for working with technology.

| Implementation

Implementation

Students created a web-based virtual museum of African art for the KU Anthropological Research and Cultural Collections. To complete the website project, students worked in groups to conduct in-depth research, read sophisticated scholarship, evaluate scholarly literature, and write scholarly texts. Each student group chose an object from the museum collection. They contacted an expert in the field to acquire verification of the provenance of their object and to solicit gifts of field research photographs and video clips. Students dealt with the museum object hands-on and created a condition report. In addition, they learned technical skills such as photographing the art object in a professional setting and constructing a website from scratch. Finally, they presented their work in front of the class.

In past semesters, I observed that students had difficulty working in groups, struggled with the technical aspects of web design, and felt the project was disconnected from the course. Therefore, during Fall 2006, I refined this project by redefining how groups were formed, eased the technical burden of website deign by providing step-by-step technical instructions, and included previous students’ websites in lectures to integrate the project with course material.

| Student Performance

Student Performance

Because the website is meant to be viewed by the public, I wanted students to produce A-level work. I therefore taught toward mastery by viewing multiple drafts and scaffolding the project with assignments at several stages. Consequently, the web pages were, for the most part, well researched. However, when I compared student products from before Fall 2006 to those produced when I enacted changes in my course, I found that the changes I made did not result in a higher level of student performance; in fact, web pages seemed to contain less factual background for the objects, and—though technically sound—most pages lacked the level of creativity exhibited by students in previous semesters.

| Reflections

Reflections

Based on course evaluations, students appreciated the exposure to many aspects of the art history field that they gained while working on this project. Moreover, they responded positively to the idea of situated feedback; that is, the idea that I was not the sole audience or beneficiary of their work. They appreciated and appeared motivated by the fact that they were creating something their classmates and the general public would see and use—not just something a professor would grade. Therefore, I will continue to seek ways that students can produce work for an audience other than myself.

However, the fact that student performance did not improve, combined with comments I received from students on evaluations, has prompted me to re-evaluate my approach to this project and consider future changes. This project may be more successful if I were able to devote more class time to group work; however, that does not currently seem like a feasible option for this class structure. Therefore, I may consider making this project an option for individual students. I also think that by providing students with technical directions, I may have removed some of the challenge that in previous semesters captivated students and increased their investment and creativity in the project.

| Summary

Project Summary

A team-based course project challenges students at the University of Kansas to create a web page that contributes to a virtual tour of the Spencer Museum’s African art collection.

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