July 27, 2008
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R. Maria Marable-Bunch, Associate Director, Teacher Programs, Department of Museum Education, The Art Institute of Chicago
“The Art Institute is for all people, and indeed for all teachers—not just a select group.”
—Ms. R. Maria Marable-Bunch
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Ms. R. Maria Marable-Bunch (foreground) sits on the floor with her young charges, giving them instructions about the art activity they are about to do. This is a group of Pre-K students from Jungman Elementary School, a public school in Chicago. |
If you haven’t been to The Art Institute of Chicago, you’re missing out on a wealth of international art treasures and possibly one of the best museum educational services to teachers and parents alike: the Education Department. It offers Teacher and Student Programs, as well as Family Programs and exhibits. But even if you can’t take your pupils or children to The Art Institute of Chicago in person, you can access its extensive Web resources offered online at www.artic.edu/aic/students/trc/index.html. Within the Art Institute’s Education Department and Teacher Programs is the Elizabeth Stone Robson Teacher Resource Center—and the person overseeing this area is Ms. R. Maria Marable-Bunch, associate director of Teacher Programs. She manages a staff of six who publish lesson plans and other materials to support art education in the classroom. Maria also helps to coordinate a large group of volunteer docents who dedicate their time to enhancing the educational offerings at the Art Institute. Technos spoke recently with Ms. Marable-Bunch about the programs and services that the Art Institute offers to teachers, parents, and students.
T: Tell us about the teacher materials. How do you find the teachers who submit materials to the Resource Center? And what types of programs do you offer?
R.M.M-B.: Like most of the museums in Chicago, we offer an array of teacher programs: Workshops, for instance, one-day and three-day programs; and we do in-services, when the principal of a school might arrange for a group of teachers to do a professional development day here at the Art Institute. We also do special events, such as our annual open house program, when we highlight what we’re offering for the year, including possibly a special exhibition. We also do another annual event, called Art Volunteers in the Classroom, AVIC, which is geared toward parents and teachers. Both the open house and AVIC will occur in October or November.
Who are the AVIC volunteers?
The participants are parents and teachers in the classroom, who often find what we’re teaching the parents can be useful for them. At the same time, we’re addressing a need that the parents have to go back and help in the classroom—especially at schools that may not have an art teacher, but the regular classroom teacher will allow a parent volunteer to come in and do a lesson, say, once a month about a particular work of art. Several area schools have an active volunteer in the classroom program.
A lot of schools have had to cut art and music programs because of budget constraints.
Yes. The AVIC program is one way of being able to continue having something happening in the schools that is focused on the arts. And it’s a very popular program. We have the regulars who come every year, and then they bring other new volunteers with them.
When they come in for the AVIC, what happens?
First, we produce materials for them, based on a particular work of art, which include background information, suggested activities, a lesson plan, vocabulary, bibliography, and a poster for the classroom. The Teacher Programs staff generates these materials, and occasionally we’ll get some input from other staff members within the Museum Education Department—so it becomes a team effort. The program consists of a lecture by one of the museum’s lecturers or curators; education staff “models” how to present the materials in a classroom setting; and the volunteers and teachers have the opportunity to network and share ideas.
You mentioned the Museum Education Department…
Yes. I should explain to you the organization of our Museum Education Department. It consists of five major divisions: Teacher Programs, Student Programs, Family Programs and Interpretive Exhibitions, Adult Programs, and Performance Programs. The department has 35 staff members.
Do you try to coordinate your programs with what is being featured at the Art Institute at that time?
Yes. We pay close attention to the exhibition schedule when we plan our programs and our publications for teachers. However, we can’t always plan events and programs for every exhibition—the Art Institute has a lot of them, and they aren’t all of interest to every classroom teacher.
What sort of educational backgrounds do your staff members have?
It varies. The Teacher Programs staff is an interesting group; we are not all art historians. Elijah has an MFA degree in studio art and he is also a writer; Kate has a master’s degree in art education; Jocelyn has a master’s in art history. Ann is probably our most interesting staff member, because she has an engineering degree and decided to get a master’s degree in art history. Grace, who works with us part time, is a recent art history major. I started out with an undergraduate degree in studio art and art history and went on to earn a master’s degree in museum education.
And all of you work together on producing the materials that you provide here in the Teacher Resource Center.
Yes. It depends upon the theme. Sometimes it may be a team effort; sometimes an individual may decide he or she really wants to write about a particular work of art. We consult with each other as to what we want to focus on. And, of course, we’re around teachers so much that we hear from them what they need and want for their classrooms. We get ideas from them through evaluations of our workshops and surveys of teachers who come in to use the Center.
The Teacher Resource Center is open to teachers to come in and borrow a book or video, or use the materials you have here.
Right—they can borrow videos and the materials we have; they can copy materials, if they’d like, free of charge. Some of our books belong to the Institute’s Library system, and those aren’t allowed to leave the premises, but can be read here, of course. The materials we’ve developed can also be purchased.
How is the Center funded?
The Art Institute is nonprofit, and the Teacher Resource Center is funded through a number of ways. Funding for the center is supported by the museum operating budget as well as from generous donors like Elizabeth Stone Robson for whom the center is named, and a corps of about 150 docents who are also generous contributors to the center. We also generate income through the sale of our materials, the profits from which usually go toward reprints or development of new products.
You have students coming in for field trips, too. How does that work?
We require teachers to pre-register their classes for a guided tour. We offer an array of tours, from African art to Impressionism, to Modern and Contemporary art. A teacher can also arrange for a self-guided or teacher-led tour, which can be planned right here in our Center in advance. Teachers can go online for further information about our guided tours.
How many kids, roughly, will come through here with their classes over a year’s time?
We have about 120,000 Pre-K–12 students per year who visit us during field trips. We get most tour requests during the springtime. Recently, we’ve seen an increase in pre-K groups coming.
What services are available on your Web site?
We have online resources for teachers on our Web site. For example, Art Access is one of our most popular online resources because it provides sample lesson plans, activities, bibliographies, and images to download for use in the classroom. Teacher programs and school tour information are also available on our Web site, along with online registration forms. Our list of resources is downloadable in .pdf format, and teachers can request to borrow materials online before coming in to the Center. Another interesting feature we provide on the Web is an interactive scrapbook, Art Explorer, which a teacher can use in the classroom or assign to his or her students to create their own scrapbooks based on the chosen art lesson.
Teachers can start on our Web site to gather information; then we encourage them to come to the Teacher Resource Center to plan, and finally to bring their students here for a guided tour. These services and materials are all free to teachers and students of the state of Illinois; out-of-state students and teachers must pay a small fee (except on Tuesday, which is Free Day at the Art Institute of Chicago).
Let’s talk about your teacher workshops. How do those work?
We offer teacher workshops throughout the year—from September through May, most of the programs are on Saturdays, and sometimes on Thursday evening; during the summer, especially during the month of July, we offer programs during the week. Our teacher workshops are fee-based, and we offer continuing education credit for those and for our in-services. We found that most Chicago public school teachers pursue re-certification through Aurora University, so we now offer graduate-level credit through Aurora U. for completion of our three-day courses.
How many teachers, typically, will you have signed up for a workshop?
For our four-hour workshops, we can accommodate anywhere from 25 to 45 teachers. We try to keep those numbers manageable because we take them out into the galleries, really get them out into the museum. If we’re doing an extensive hands-on workshop, such as our current ceramics course, we limit the number to 25 per class. That particular group is actually doing hands-on ceramic work with an artist in the studio. Sometimes we use museum staff to teach such courses, or curators, and in some cases, we hire lecturers, depending on the topic.
Who might show up to take the workshops or do some research here at the Resource Center?
From a high school, most likely the art teacher will be the person to participate in a workshop. But, depending on the topic of the workshop, it could be the English teacher or the history teacher or the science teacher—we do a lot of interdisciplinary workshop topics. From an elementary or middle school, we’ll see the classroom teacher, who may or may not be certified to teach art as a subject area.
I would most like to emphasize that the Art Institute is for all people, and indeed for all teachers—not just a select group. We design teacher programs to address the state learning standards that teachers are required to meet, particularly those standards for language arts, visual arts, literacy, history, and social studies. As part of our workshops, we provide teachers with educational materials that they can use in the classroom. Therefore, we encourage teachers in all subject areas and with any interest in art to contact us and to utilize our Resource Center.
Contact Ms. Maria Marable-Bunch at The Art Institute of Chicago’s Teacher Programs, rmarablebunch@artic.edu. Postal address: The Art Institute of Chicago, Department of Museum Education Teacher Programs, 111 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60603-6110. Teacher Resource Center: phone, 312-443-3719; Web site, www.artic.edu/aic/students.