‘Work of the Week’ Activity in A226: Assessing its Application as a Teaching Tool

The ‘Work of the Week’ activity is based on a selection of a single work per week from the module materials of the second level art history module Exploring Art and Visual Culture (A226). The work is chosen from the materials the students have completed in the immediately preceding week in their calendar. This activity invites students to use three words to describe the selected work of art and seeks to: 

– build students’ confidence in engaging with art works; 
– encourage students to reflect on and discuss issues and topis arising from the module materials; 
– provide a revision tool; 
– enhance teaching experience; 
– enhance retention and progression; 
– support a sense of community within the student cohort. 

This activity also includes one invitation for the students to choose their own work from a specific set of module materials and post it along their own three-word description; and a competition announced shortly before Christmas with a book prize for the three best descriptions submitted for a work of art chosen from the module material by a third party, which aims at enhancing post winter break retention. The best three descriptions are selected by the extended Module Team. 

In addition to enhancing student experience and supporting overall retention and progression, this activity aims at tackling the issue of ‘elitism’ in art history. The perception of art history as an ‘elitist’ discipline is not just anecdotal. It has roots in socio-economic developments, especially post WWII, such as the engagement with this particular discipline of mainly white peoples, both as institution representatives (higher education, museums, galleries) as well as collectors. One recent book that addresses aspects of this development is Jennifer C. Lena, Entitled: Discriminating Tastes and the Expansion of the Arts (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2019) (for a review, see Amanda Koontz, ‘The Construction of Distinctly American Art and Elitism: The People, Moments, and Actions that Have Shaped U.S. Arts as We Know Them’, Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, vol. 50, issue 1, 2021, pp. 11-16). In a world where the importance of visual literacy is increasing, so is the need for the ‘democratisation’ of art history. The ‘Work of the Week’ activity aims at exploring aspects of how to make the teaching of art history more effective in order to lead to the discipline ‘opening its doors’ to a more diverse student cohort by reducing its perceived ‘high-brow’ aspect. A key question that lies at the core of this scholarship research project would be how to make art history a more inclusive discipline. In turn, this question has a broader resonance within the wider study of Arts and Humanities, which faces similar problems regarding limitations in the diversification of its student population. Hence, a final and important aim of this scholarship project is to evaluate the usefulness of the ‘Work of the Week’ activity in shifting students’ perception on what art history might involve.