Who I am, who I was, who I thought I was going to be
I like to tell kids that a good 50–75% of art history is saying big words to sound smart. Part of me is joking, part of me is serious. It usually gets a chuckle or a smile from even the most disinterested student. But what’s the point of teaching those “big” words if the student isn’t being engaged?
My path to becoming an educator was a long and winding one. It is nothing like how I thought it would be, and it’s revealing a lot about what I’ve learned and what I still need to unlearn. This essay/article/rambling is probably about 5 conversations in one, but they all tie together somehow. OR maybe they don’t. Gotta love ADHD brains making connections that don’t actually exist.
When I was in college, I was convinced I wanted to be a museum curator. Or at least work in an art museum. I saw the Leonardo Live documentary about the 2011 exhibition at the National Gallery in February of 2012 (my senior year of high school). I was FLOORED by this documentary. It was the most exciting thing I had ever seen. I was emotional! Excited! Inspired! This was what I wanted to do with my life. I was SURE of it.
Flash forward 2 years, I had just returned from my quarter abroad after studying art history in Paris. I had direct access to some of the greatest art museums in the world, and yet I was disillusioned. I was double majoring in the History of Art & Architecture and Women’s & Gender Studies. I was learning about the deep seeded problems of the art world. The colonial histories of museums, the racist and white/eurocentric nature of collections and displays, the gender imbalance of artists shown, the way art is categorized and catalogued, the hierarchy of mediums and subjects. The list goes on.
In a panic, I decided that the art world would never move as fast in the right direction as I needed it to to feel comfortable working for it. I dropped out of the HAA program essentially. I shoved my double major down to a major/minor combo which meant I didn’t have to take another art history class for the rest of my undergraduate career.
Flash forward again, this time 6 years. It’s been 8 (almost 9) years since I watched that life changing documentary. In those 6 years, I finished my BA in Women’s and Gender Studies. I got a TEFL certificate. I fell (back) in love. I wound up in the mortgage industry of all places. I moved to a new city. I got engaged. And then came the pandemic.
I was working in food service, feeling completely burnt out even before a deadly airborne virus was threatening my health and livelihood. When the company I worked for started cracking down and showing its true colors (profit over people — corporate’s gonna corporate am I right?), I knew I needed to get out. This was always a means to an end, but I had no idea what else to do. My plan was always to go back to school to further my career and now I was being forced to find a new job or jump into a new career without the time and plan I was envisioning.
I decided to put my TEFL certificate to good use. I needed a job that kept me out of the public sphere, where I could work safely from home, and be in a field I cared about. I applied to teach for VIPKid, an online ESL company based in China. So I traded 5am espresso for 5am english classes. Teaching was always something I thought I’d be good at. And I am good at it. And I love it. So after about ten hypothetical career changes (and one hopefully final shift out of corporate service industry work), I settled into my role as an educator.
Then a friend of a friend recommended Outschool. I didn’t need any certifications that would take ages and money to complete, and I could offer classes on anything I was passionate and qualified to teach. It sounded fun, gave me a chance to be creative and put my education to use, and I could still work from home. It sounded like a great way to make money doing something I enjoyed. I applied, got approved, and guess what I started teaching classes about — Art History!
So I’m trucking along. Teaching art history to preschoolers, middle schoolers, and hopefully soon high schoolers. I’m having a great time, rediscovering my passion for the history of art and museum studies. But the longer I teach, the more I hear this tiny voice in my head.
It’s not even saying anything specific. Sometimes it’s reminding me that European cis white colonizers are not the end all be all of art. Sometimes it’s reminding me that there’s a fine line between diversity and tokenism. Sometimes it’s yelling at me about gender — I teach gender classes to kids too, which is fun as heck but requires me to simplify a really complex topic so much that I’m teaching something I don’t necessarily believe (but it’s hard to tell kids that gender doesn’t matter and nothing is real if they’ve never even heard the word transgender before). Lately, the voice has been yelling the loudest about one thing in particular: instruction styles.
When I got back into the art history game, I thought I’d try to challenge it. Make it better, make it more accessible, hold it accountable. But instead, I’m falling into the same old pattern.
Powerpoint slides.
Bad image qualities.
Dates.
Names.
Lecture.
50 minutes of a teacher saying fancy words while showing a bunch of words and pictures.
There’s a part of me that wants to make Art History interesting for EVERYONE! I want to take it out of its ivory tower and show kids that art history is super important and valuable and not some pretentious/boring/unnecessary elective they can take a nap in. There is a way to teach art history that actually engages the students and allows them to actively learn rather than passively (potentially) absorb information. There are so many teachers and creators challenging the status quo of art history education. And I want to be part of that.
And then… there’s stubborn old nerdy me. Who loves listening to lectures and hearing someone talk about the compositional complexity of this work and how the artist juxtaposes the bold color palette with rough textures and how the use of chiaroscuro has made the image life like or how the inconsistent use of light and color makes the image look dream like. How a seemingly benign landscape is actually a metaphor for the ills of society and glorifies the past to an almost harmful extent. I could go on. I love sitting in a dark room with a projector showing a slightly too pixelated version of the Raft of the Medusa as we try to see if there really is a ship off in the distance of the top right hand corner of the canvas.
I still take all my notes in STRICT outline format (Thanks Mr. Coe). Dates, names, styles, movements. They’re all so important to how I look at art history. I know the field is evolving, and I LOVE seeing that. I love looking at the new ways art history (and history more broadly) can be taught and learned. When I started, I thought I’d be one of the ones leading the charge for new teaching methods. And yet here I am clinging to old ways.
Maybe things will change if/when I can finally go back to school and learn the tricks of the trade. Maybe I’m so unwilling to let go because I feel unqualified and unprepared to try something new. Or maybe, I’m just meant to teach art history the way it’s always been taught. I have a high re-enrollment rate on this platform. And only one parent, from the 178 total students I have taught, has ever said anything even remotely negative about the way I run my classroom. Maybe treating young learners like capable and intelligent students by using lectures and big words gives them more confidence in their skills. Maybe I’m just an art history teacher that appeals to quiet learners. Maybe there is something powerful about a visibly queer, trans educator who is maybe a little too open about being neurodivergent with mental health issues showing kids that art can be academic, accessible, and awesome all at the same time.
