Academy at Charlemont Students Kick Off Yale Fieldtrip Series
Tenth-grade students at The Academy at Charlemont visited the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven recently, the first in a series of fieldtrips designed to enhance their humanities curriculum.
According to one of their teachers, Nancy Henderson of Ashfield, “The goal is to provide context for the literature we’re reading, so that students can begin to see the relationship of literature to the culture of its time.”
The class is co-taught by Henderson and Todd Sumner, head of school at The Academy. “It’s an exciting project, and I’m grateful to Nancy for designing it,” Sumner said. “This is another angle on the interdisciplinary approach we take as a matter of school philosophy, and one that I think will be particularly vivid, bringing a broader cultural awareness to our study of history and literature.”
The class’s current reading assignment is Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet; on the history side, they’re learning about Elizabethan culture. So, on this trip, they looked at Elizabethan portraiture.
“It really established a background,” according to Ben Miller, a student from Shelburne Falls, “to see how Shakespeare was living in England, and how that affected what he put into the play—how the political situation worked in England, who was in power, and how they treated the people who would be going to see these plays.”
Another student, Kate Mieher of Northampton, was intrigued by the styles on display. “It was interesting to see portraits of nobility during the time when the play was written” she said. “We had talked about different fashions and about how women tried to imitate Elizabeth’s widow’s peak by plucking their hair out, and how the ruffed collar was popular.”
The idea for the fieldtrip series came to Henderson this summer, as she considered her curriculum for the year. While teaching years earlier at Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut, she had participated in a seminar at Yale called “Face to Face,” in which teachers looked at the portraiture of a period and its relationship to history and literature.
“One thing I learned in the ‘Face-to-Face’ series,” she said, “is that you have to be careful not to allow artwork to become illustrations for the book. These are parallel creations. At the same time, there will probably be some overlap in your mind. There are some Turner paintings that, when you put them next to Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey,’ are extraordinarily powerful reflections of Romanticism. And the collection of Constable and Turner paintings at Yale is unbelievable.”
Henderson arranged the visits through Linda Friedlaender, the curator of education at the Yale Museum, whom she had met on one of her past trips. The two talked over the summer, and Friedlander liked the idea of multiple visits, especially the way such a series could become a meaningful part of the humanities curriculum. For Henderson, such an arrangement means “a museum becomes more than a one-shot deal. It become part of the curriculum—a teaching tool, and less of an object.”
The class will make three more trips to the museum. When they study Frankenstein and the Romantics, they will look at Constable and Turner; the unit on Tess of the D’Urbervilles will include a visit to examine Victorian painting; later, they will look at contemporary British art at the Yale Museum of Art.
One of Henderson’s goals is to help students see the connections not only between art and literature, but between images of the past and icons of the present day. An early assignment asked students to bring in contemporary images they felt were essential to our own historical moment. Among pictures the students shared were photographs of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, the Facebook logo, I-pod advertisements, pictures of presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and a photograph of a polar bear on a fragment of ice from a melting glacier.
