Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

842 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
helped students ponder the complexities of the modern world and the uses and abuses of power. In
the course of this unit, students viewed slides of monuments found throughout the United States.
The Statue of Liberty, Washington Monument, The Minute Man, Thomas Jefferson Monument,
The Lincoln Memorial, The Korean Memorial, The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and The Civil
Rights Memorial were examined and discussed in order to better understand the role each plays
in shaping our landscape and our attitudes. Students commented on each monument and recorded
the salient points of their discussions.
These slides helped the students think more critically about the meanings and the influences of
our national monuments, broadened their knowledge of this genre, and increased student appreciation
of their importance—both as aesthetic entities and as expressions of national consciousness.
The discussions also helped students understand that artists—through their works—represent the
attitudes of the time and place in which they live. To stimulate greater involvement, students
designed a book cover that represented a person and/or an event they wished to commemorate.
This created the opportunity to consider what was important to them and, in their presentations,
to attempt to convince others of the logic of their choice and the importance of the person/event
being remembered. Students took a walking tour of our school, Montclair High School and its
grounds to examine its monuments. This heightened their awareness of the local landscape. After
reviewing their findings, students realized that much of the school’s landscape had been totally
foreign to them, since they neither recognized the persons commemorated by the bas-reliefs
sculptures nor the connection of these figures with of Montclair High School. For the most part,
all that they had seen were figures of white men and a few white women. Students then were asked
what monuments they would create to add to the school’s landscape. This exercise enabled them
to voice their concerns, to “lobby for their cause.” In keeping with the tenets of postformalism,
students reflected on the fact that these particular monuments commemorated only one dimension
of the community at large. This was problematic for most students of color. They wondered
why the school’s landscape was not populated with figures of: Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma
Gandhi, Maya Angelou, W.E.B. Dubois, Frederick Douglas, Ida B. Wells, Harriet Tubman, Jacob
Lawrence, and Langston Hughes, to name a few.
As apprentices hone their skills by learning from the master, it was important that my apprentices
learn to research all of the skills and history of art from the perspective of an artist. To
initiate this unit, students viewed a PowerPoint presentation that provided an overview of the
traditional canon of Western European art, beginning with cave paintings and ending with contemporary
conceptual art. The presentation gave the students an inkling of how Western art and
its functions have changed over the past seven centuries. They also gained an appreciation of the
fact that artworks tell a visual story of culture—that they reflect the major beliefs and pervasive
behaviors of a specific society at a specific period. I was mindful that the artists represented were
white males; nevertheless, the intent was to introduce the traditional canon and then bridge to a
more pluralistic, inclusive approach. For many of my students, this was the first time they had
been introduced to art history, the first time they had viewed these works of art. This activity
provided a grounding—however basic—of the subject, and was undertaken so that my students
could understand the continuum that has led from primitive expression to contemporary expression
Further, the overview emphasized the usefulness of an interdisciplinary approach to the
subject.
The overview began with color slides of the Lascaux cave paintings (France) and of the Great
Pyramids (Egypt) to underscore the story-telling functions of art. Students then viewed the works
of Giotto, Da Vinci, and Michelangelo whose paintings—commissioned by the Roman Catholic
Church—served a didactic function: to educate an illiterate populace by conveying religious and
ethical messages of the Old and New Testaments. Portraits of the nobility of Spain, immortalized
by Velázquez and Goya, brought home that, at one time, only the personal histories of the