Museum Trip Reflection & Burnham Response

Taking the trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art with our class was a very different museum experience from the one I usually have. I honestly prefer to go to museums alone so that I may take whatever amount of time I want looking at and thinking about the pieces that attract my attention. I often feel pressured to hurry up or slow down when at the museum with someone else who is moving at a different pace than I am. 

However, when going with a class for educationally related purposes — and especially if the visit is tied into something students are studying as part of another subject area — I can appreciate the value of going with a group. I did enjoy hearing other people’s opinions on the masks we were discussing and noticing things that others pointed out that I didn’t initially see in the pieces. It definitely opens your eyes up to various elements of the art, as well as to the fact that different people perceive art differently.

I also really appreciated the activity of sitting down to sketch a piece of art. It really made me slow down and look at one piece in great detail. And it promoted the development of a connection with a piece of art. When you sit there and really study a piece and really work to capture every little detail, it becomes much more meaningful to you than just walking by, taking a glance and reading the card next to it that tells you all you need to know about it.

I think it’s so valuable for us as teachers to plan museum trips and create activities that really speak to our students’ experiences and encourage them to explore the art, derive their own conclusions and make their own connections. “What is apparent [to our students] is their feelings, the urgent need to bring their own experience to the work of art and the desire to ask their own questions” (Burnham, 1994, p. 521). I really connect with what Rika Burnham says there. It’s so critical for students to be able to experience art for themselves. If they’re just fed information that has not relevance or connection to them, then it’s just memorizing rote facts, not really experiencing the art for what it is. 

Regurgitating the “facts” for students “severely limit[s] the possibility for a perceptual and personal relationship with a work of art. The students realize their participation is irrelevant, that other people have already defined what is important and significant” (Burnham, 1994, p. 521). I liked the approach that was taken with us where we were asked guiding questions to scaffold our thinking but weren’t fed information. We were asked to think for ourselves and notice things in the art for ourselves. Toward the end of our discussion, some questions were answered by looking to the information card accompanying the mask display we were discussing, but most of our conversation revolved around what we noticed, not what historians or archaeologists or museum curators wanted us to notice.