On April 10, the University Museum of Contemporary Art bustled with nearly sixty fifth graders from Amherst’s Wildwood Elementary School. In one gallery, students searched Tammy Nguyen’s paintings in The Political Uses of Madness for symbols and imagery. In another, they sketched responses to a contemporary work in Deja Vu: The Cycles That Haunt Us. Down the hall, a group connected themes from Camille Turner’s exhibition, Land of the Free, to their own lives.
The students were following a lesson plan developed by UMass students in Art History 327, a service-learning course in which undergraduate students teach local K-12 students by bringing them directly into the museum for hands-on engagement with contemporary art.
Art History 327 introduces students to contemporary art and criticism, with a particular emphasis on community engagement and social practice art. Students in the course work with the museum’s staff to coordinate group visits with area K-12 students, using the museum’s exhibitions to spark critical discussions about museums, history, and culture.
This spring semester, the class partnered with three schools: Wildwood Elementary School, Holyoke’s Dean Technical High School, and Springfield’s Sci-Tech High School.
Nate Palmer, a senior computer science and art major and team leader in the course, worked with classmates to develop lesson plans for Wildwood Elementary’s fifth grade class.
Before bringing the students to the museum, Palmer and his team visited Wildwood, leading a stone-wrapping activity inspired by Camille Turner's exhibition. The exhibition features a cinematic performance work, 80 Died of Flux and Flu, in which Turner individually wraps eighty stones to memorialize and honor the lives of eighty enslaved persons who died aboard the slave ship Sarah. To prepare the students for their visit to the exhibition, Palmer’s team had students decorate rocks with words and symbols that were important to them. The students then wrapped the rocks in gauze and tissue paper as a symbolic nod to Turner’s piece.
“They made the rocks special and important to them, and it gave them the protection and the remembrance of that thing by wrapping it,” Palmer said.
Working with the students in their own classroom prior to visiting the museum, Palmer said, “gave them the ability to empathize with the mindset of the artists,” helping students connect emotionally with the work before seeing it in the museum.
During their museum visit, Palmer’s group asked the fifth graders to sit and watch a few minutes of 80 Died of Flux and Flu, then write keywords on sticky notes. “Cherish” and “peace” came to mind for a couple of students.
“These activities gave them a reason to look closer,” Palmer said. “In the art museum, with the modern attention span, the time you spend looking at a work is way shorter than it should be. We wanted to make things activity-based and focused, in order to give [the students] a chance to take more time.”
In Turner’s Afronautic Research Lab — an interactive archive documenting evidence of our local history of slavery — the students sorted through the research materials and were instructed to focus on the names of places they recognized.
“Then we talked about how those places are in the north, and we don’t usually connect those with slavery,” Palmer said. “They had just done their Middle Passage unit, so they were well prepared with historical knowledge for this. … They were then able to take the work at a more emotional level.”
As much as the fifth grade students learned, Palmer said he learned just as much.
“The kids brought forward these really emotionally mature ideas, and it was so impressive to see how well they interacted with the museum and its work,” he said.
Hanna Simunek, a sophomore art and communications major who led the team facilitating Dean Tech’s visit, also noticed the effect the class had on the students.
“The opportunity to go outside of their own school and the exposure could awaken something,” Simunek said, “especially for schools and children in general who aren’t really well versed in how to express themselves.”
For Palmer, the experience ultimately reinforced the importance of making museums feel accessible to young learners.
“This is a great way to break down that barrier and really allow people to come in with an open mind,” Palmer said. “As someone who is very comfortable in museums, it made me really happy to be able to bring people into that experience.”
Photos by Noah Lev Bartell-Mangel. Story by Maddie Fabian.