I also came to the end of the MoMA course on Art and Inquiry. I didn’t complete this one – the final assignment was “to take the concepts we have explored each week and create a resource that you can incorporate into your teaching (to share with peers for their responses).” Since I’m not teaching I couldn’t summon interest in the project. In this class, it wasn’t the processes of “inquiry” that interested me, but the exploration of the art. I did get a chance to do that – to view many pieces in the MoMA collection, I perused the MoMA Learning Site, I engaged in some discussion about works of art. So I got out of the course what I wanted from it.
A classroom teacher or parent, I think, would find the course helpful for learning how to engage young people in conversation about all kinds of objects and artifacts (not just works of art). It would help them think about curriculum in more open-ended ways. They’d be able to consider using common everyday objects as jump off points for learning – take a candy bar wrapper – there’s lots of printed information on it about nutrition (what does all of that mean?), about the ingredients in the bar (where they are grown and what are the working conditions like for those growers), about where the bar was manufactured (how is the bar made?) – and there are also lots of questions about the wrapper itself as an object – about the paper, the printing process, the design of the layout, of the oblique messages in the design…
Our world is filled with objects/artifacts – any one of which represents a rich potential for all kinds of learning, provided we adults have an understanding of how to draw children’s attention to what’s around them.
On Learning 