Teaching With Traumatic Images: War in the Art Museum

• In Event: 54.064 - Engaging Complex Social and Scientific Issues in Informal Learning Spaces

Abstract

Objective
As interdisciplinary community teaching spaces, museums can serve as a natural nexus for socially engaged cross-disciplinary teaching and learning, fostering and supporting the investigation of questions about how to best understand, curate, and educate around trauma images and narratives as they emerge from an exhibition of photo-documentary images of modern war. A growing body of literature indicates that curators are seriously considering the complexities of social trauma as they design collections that teach about it (see for example Lehrer, Milton & Paterson, 2011). The purpose of this paper is to make sense of what Vallance (1995) calls “the public curriculum of orderly images”- the museum curriculum that includes the images and their interpretation, educational program offerings, and publications surrounding the program- resulting from a recent art exhibition of modern war photography. In addition to questioning the “public curriculum,” we begin to evaluate its teaching power through the analysis and interpretation of visitor feedback left in the exhibit.

Perspective:
As cultural carriers (Alexander, 2004/2013; Simon, 1992/2014) museums participate in the shaping of culturally traumatic events. Given the power of this position, attention needs to be paid to the construction of the “public curriculum” and the narrative shaped therein. In open acknowledgement of this position, we argue that museums must be tasked with constructing pedagogical experiences in a way that aspires towards “ways of naming and legitimating…efforts to define complementary possibilities for progressive practice,” as a means to engender hope in fraught times (Simon, 1992 xvi).

Methods-data
This project uses case study methods (Yin 2014, Stake 1995) to explore the “teaching” and “learning” that happens in a museum exhibit centered on traumatic images by looking closely at museum interpretation and visitor experiences surrounding the work of photojournalist James Nacthwey as presented in a 2015 exhibition at a regional fine arts museum in the northeastern United States. Data sources include approximately 300 written comments left in response to open-ended questions (i.e. “When I see these pictures I…”) shared in the audience response section of the exhibit, as well as the photos themselves, the museum’s public and media documents (tour and training materials, lesson plans, press releases and newspaper reporting and artist statements), and first-hand narrative experiences of the researchers who worked on the exhibit.

Results
Preliminary data analysis is underway. Early findings suggest that the affective power of the exhibit content was central to the visitor experience, with visitors reporting feeling overwhelmed, saddened, and exhausted. Additionally, artistic and curatorial decision to depict the images chronologically lent itself to a visitor understanding of a causal relationship between the war in Afghanistan, the attacks of 9/11, and the resultant death and devastation in Iraq.

Significance
Given their social position, museums can and should be places that foster and support the investigation of questions about how to best understand, curate, and educate around topics of trauma. By exploring one museum’s “public curriculum” and a snapshot of the audience experience, this paper contributes to the complicated conversation on teaching difficult topics in the complex museum context.

Authors

• Sara Clarke-Vivier, Washington College

• Megan McIntyre, Currier Museum of Art