By Stacy Rodenberger
Coordinator of School Programs

The first week of August found the Museum’s Winslow Homer Gallery buzzing with teachers from all across the country. They were participants in the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth’s four-week teacher institute, Maritime America in the Age of Winslow Homer, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. From their home base at the UMass Dartmouth campus, these teachers traveled to the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the RISD Museum of Art, and to the PMA to study original paintings, watercolors, prints, and drawings by Winslow Homer. They also visited several maritime history centers, including the New Bedford Whaling Museum, in an interdisciplinary study of the culture, economics, history, and art of late 19th century America. Homer’s famous paintings of Gloucester, Massachusetts and the Maine coast served as the visual thread in this intensive, thematic study.

The participants were K-12 teachers from a variety of disciplines, including visual arts, social studies, science, and language arts, and their goal was to develop an interdisciplinary lesson plan based on Winslow Homer and maritime history to teach in their classrooms this fall. As a consultant to the project, I had the opportunity to work with teachers and to hear their lesson plan presentations. At the PMA, we closely examined the paintings in our collection with Homer scholar Marc Simpson, curator from the Clark Art Institute, including Sharpshooter, Artists Sketching in the White Mountains, as well as two of Homer’s ocean-themed paintings: Taking an Observation and Weatherbeaten. We also discussed ways that teachers can place Homer’s art at the center of the curriculum, techniques for developing a truly integrated lesson plan based on careful looking and extended conversations about the work of art, and reviewed formative assessments to measure student progress.

Back at the UMass Dartmouth campus, it was a treat to hear how the teachers had synthesized three and a half weeks of content and experiences into cohesive, creative lesson plans for their students. Building on larger themes such as “exploration,” “interdependence,” “labor,” and “sea life,” teachers from Washington state, Washington, D.C., Tennessee, Oklahoma, Massachusetts, and Maine shared the ways they will engage their students in the art and time of Winslow Homer while meeting their state education standards in a variety of content areas. The teachers were energized to go back to school, to collaborate with colleagues, and to test their lessons with students this fall.

Having planned and presented my own Winslow Homer-themed Summer Institute for Teachers here at the PMA, I applaud the hard work and creative planning by Dr. Arlene Mollo and Dr. Mary Malloy, co-directors of the institute. The teachers had an amazing learning experience that will have a major impact on students across the country. I also learned so much from the directors and teacher participants that will influence future PMA teacher institutes and workshops. The Portland Museum of Art is proud to have been a part of this special program. If you are interested in seeing the teachers’ lesson plans, please visit http://www.umassd.edu/specialprograms/mawh/ in September.

Image credit: Winslow Homer (United States, 1836–1910), Weatherbeaten, 1894, oil on canvas, 28 1/2 x 48 3/8 inches. Portland Museum of Art, Maine, 1988.55.1.