Cohort April 2024: Faculty of Arts – Jillian Lerner, Victoria Ajenstat
Project background
Our partnership concerns reimagining ARTH 439, a senior seminar in nineteenth-century visual culture, as a study abroad course in Paris. The redesign involves converting a typical 14-week Winter Term course delivered at UBC-V into a 3-week intensive summer course, comprising one week of foundational classes (online or in-person at UBC- V) followed by 2 weeks of immersive learning in Paris. We will work collaboratively to create new curriculum and adjust pedagogical approaches to center experiential and place-based learning, drawing advantage from the opportunity for embodied, context-rich student engagement with important artworks and sites of nineteenth-century French visual culture.
Project details
Multiple dimensions of the course will need modification, from delivery modalities, assignments and assessments, to the planning of site-specific learning activities. Both conceptual and practical work will be required to organize museum visits, walking tours, expert presentations, and hands-on research workshops in French archives and collections. We will develop and adapt the operative teaching and learning strategies for in-person study of material artifacts, built environments, and exhibition spaces, and for the purposes of demonstrating how these physical conditions shape aesthetic experience and art-historical interpretation. We will also assess student needs, and investigate ways to make this study abroad course more welcoming and accessible to a diversity of students.
All of these elements of redesign would benefit from a student-faculty collaboration, which we conceive as an opportunity for mutual learning, adaptive pedagogy, curriculum development, art-history program enhancement, and cohort building. Our redesign should augment student learning in the course, fostering disciplinary proficiency, professional skills, and holistic education through engaged learning, object-based research, and supported travel opportunities. We believe that using our student needs assessment to inform travel planning and universal learning design, will enable us to recruit and support diverse participants and foster inclusivity, access, affordability, wellbeing, and social belonging in the cohort.