ELA-8 art teacher Jennifer Moore will be among the roster of speakers at the National Art Education Association's National Convention in Chicago next week. There she will co-present alongside Rebecca Tittermary, Lower School art at Worcester Preparatory School (Berlin, Md.), and Justina Yee, Museum Educator of Teacher Studies at the National Gallery of Art, in a session titled "Leading from Multiple Viewpoints: Integrating Studio, Art History, and Museum Best Practices."
In summer 2014, Moore and Tittermary accepted the invitation to participate in the Summer Teacher Institute at the National Gallery of Art, where they acquired research-based interdisciplinary strategies for integrating art history into classroom instruction. Since attending, they have successfully used what they gained from the experience to create engaging new lesson plans, classroom activities, field trips, summer camps and conference presentations.
"Jennifer does an incredible job inspiring our students to pursue art, and the artwork that is produced in her classroom is exceptional," said Kim Tunnell, Darlington's director of fine arts. "There is so much value in what she brings back to the classroom. Her professional development opportunities have really influenced students to dig more into art and art history, and to be continually impacted by the greats and their contributions."
Moore and her colleagues will speak on best practices taken from the Teacher Institute, wisdom gained from real-world application, and their own lesson plans to bring the session to life. The trio will share practical techniques for exploring artwork in the classroom, lead a hands-on sketching activity designed to explore color and perspective in Impressionism, and help attendees to begin the process of outlining their own integrated art lessons.
One of Moore's recent cross-curricular lessons incorporating fourth-grade writing will be noted specifically in the conference presentation. Darlington students were assigned individual paintings from the Post-Impressionist, Abstract Expressionist, and Modern art periods and the task of describing the mood, style, size and orientation using art terminology, metaphors and similes, adjectives, adverbs, verbs and senses. Each student traded descriptions with a partner, who was then challenged to recreate the artwork based solely on what was penned by their classmate.
Throughout the last two years, the art teacher has chronicled and shared many of these integrated units, the field trips and student work from her classroom on Instagram using the #whatwearedoinginart.
