Feminist Approaches to the Survey

Abstract

Based on our 1993 CAA panel Curriculum Transformation in Art History and subsequent sessions on pedagogy, we propose to reconceptualize knowledge in our discipline and to revise the teaching of the art history survey. We make two assumptions regarding the introductory survey classes in the history of art: that they will continue to be taught (though transformed, perhaps one day including non-Western and Western art in equal and well-integrated areas of knowledge) and that feminism is understood to include multiculturalism, postcolonial theory, and the unfixing of boundaries in general toward the liberation of all people (fig. 3). In the last twenty years, we have seen the flowering of women's studies programs and feminist rereadings of almost every academic discourse. Much has been accomplished, but the disciplines themselves have not been transformed. In art history feminism has meant adding information on women's achievements and more recently changing the preexisting structure of learning.' It is not enough, however, to deconstruct the modern tradition on the level of theory without a renewal of educational practice. We propose here to share our classroom strategies, assignments, the nuts and bolts of revisionist teaching. Our primary goal is to empower students and to have them become collaborators in their own learning and not mere receptacles for data. To achieve these goals, we must do more than provide a chronology of artists and periods, although chronology provides a useful scaffolding on which to build themes; to provide cultural context; to demonstrate relationships of image to image, culture to culture, and historical to critical commentary. Most survey texts provide the chronology but can be supplemented with alternative texts-articles, primary sources, books on art writing and methodology, field trips, guest lectures, the resources in your region. Current survey texts are often not appropriate for the new demands we are making of them, but more suitable texts have appeared recently, and we hope even better ones are being written. The biggest problem with the survey texts is their monolithic, authoritarian tone, as if anything omitted is insignificant or unworthy. We both used Helen Gardner, Art through the Ages (9th ed., 1991), and Whitney Chadwick, Women: Art and Society (1990), as texts. In a recent class of 167 students, Dietrich hoped for a dialogue between the two books as well as between students and texts. At the end of the course she