Faculty, Student, and Gallery collaborations for enhanced classroom learning

Abstract

The Acadia University Art Gallery, under the leadership of Dr. L. Dalton, provides students the opportunity to work with items from the gallery collection. This promotes object-based learning, an active learning technique which puts source material at the centre of the discussion. Such an approach makes galleries/museums excellent sites for Cooperative Learning and Project Based Learning (PBL) pedagogies. These principles were put in practice as students in Dr. J. MacDonald’s classes worked with items from The Bleakney Donation of brass rubbings. Dr. MacDonald will talk about developing students’ skills through multimodal assignments, share her work with various assignment types and will discuss the flexibility needed from instructors for successful PBL.Workshop participants will interact with objects from the Acadia University Art Gallery, ones chosen by Dr. Dalton to appeal to those teaching in various disciplines. Working in groups, participants will think about what can be learned from their objects and how they might include object-focused PBL in their courses.