Teachable Monuments

Using Public Art to Spark Dialogue and Confront Controversy

Sierra Rooney, Jennifer Wingate, Harriet F. Senie

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501356933
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Monuments around the world have become the focus of intense and sustained discussions, activism, vandalism, and removal. Since the convulsive events of 2015 and 2017, during which white supremacists committed violence in the shadow of Confederate symbols, and the 2020 nationwide protests against racism and police brutality, protesters and politicians in the United States have removed Confederate monuments, as well as monuments to historical figures like Christopher Columbus and Dr. J. Marion Sims, questioning their legitimacy as present-day heroes that their place in the public sphere reinforces. The essays included in this anthology offer guidelines and case studies tailored for students and teachers to demonstrate how monuments can be used to deepen civic and historical engagement and social dialogue. Essays analyze specific controversies throughout North America with various outcomes as well as examples of monuments that convey outdated or unwelcome value systems without prompting debate.

Part One

Teaching Strategies

1

Developing Essential Questions for a Student-Driven Fourth Grade Monument Study

By Adelaide Wainwright

On a gray winter afternoon in Brooklyn, the throngs of workers that populate the courthouses and office buildings of Cadman Plaza West moved along the sidewalk at their typical, steady pace. They were New Yorkers, and they bore little mind to interruptions to the flow of their stream: dogs tugging at leashes, tourists squinting into the horizon as they sought out the Brooklyn Bridge, even physical impediments. They moved around each with purpose and mindless ease. By contrast, another set of New Yorkers had sprung from their neighboring school with all the wild enthusiasm of a catch of fry, carried with the current while shooting off to ogle the distractions of their environs. These were fourth graders, and though they traveled with purpose, they traveled with wonder, too.

A few blocks from campus, the nebulous mass of twenty-two students—along with me and their associate classroom teacher, their director of Diversity and Equity, and a parent and expert on the monument they would soon interrogate—gathered together, our proximity a buffer to the cold, blustery winds. The students carried clipboards with trip sheets and pencils. As the group quieted, I alerted them to the first prompt posed on their sheet, an initial consideration that came from their own work in the weeks prior: “Describe what you see. Be as specific as possible—details are important!” They looked up at the great metal artifact, which acted much like a river boulder carving into the surrounding flow. In the hush, pencils scratched while a few students wandered to the opposite side to get a different view. After a few minutes of seeing, observations poured forth:

“It’s made out of metal. A dark metal! I wonder if it was carved or cast.”

“It’s so tall! That thing at the bottom—that pedestal?—makes that man stand really high.” It was true. At nearly fifteen feet tall, the height of the monument made the 9- and 10-year-olds crane their necks to take it all in.

“He’s wearing a jacket, or a cape that makes him look important. It looks as if he’s going on a quest, or as if he has some really serious work to do.”

Students erupted into a frenzy of chatter with theories about who this man might be. At this, I reminded students of our conversations about the difference between observation and interpretation. We were drifting quickly into the realm of the latter, but it is difficult to steer away from that course. So, I encouraged them to bring their gaze down to a stratum of the monument that had not yet captured their attention. To the left and below the large male figure, at the base of the pedestal, a female figure kneels on one knee while stepping off the other foot. She appears to be placing a palm branch at the man’s feet. On the other side of the pedestal, two children seem to be working together to lay a garland, again at the man’s feet. Several students were taken aback that they had somehow missed these figures so close to their eye level.

One of my more outspoken, dynamic, and observant students looked uncharacteristically uncomfortable. “I want to talk about the woman on the left,” he said. “I’m not sure how to put this … but there’s a way we think of people looking based on their race, and I think that woman is supposed to be Black.” I asked him why he would hesitate to share this observation. He replied, “Something about how this monument is put together doesn’t feel right.” Our director of Diversity and Equity stepped in and encouraged the students to use their art knowledge to think about scale in the sculpture. They looked on in quiet, some whispering to each other, until one spoke up. “Wait! That man is way, way bigger than that woman! It doesn’t look real! He looks like a giant!”

The students’ theories about the significance of this man and his relationship with the other figures in the monument circulated, one idea building off of another until a fabric of thought, reaction, and feeling had been woven. The monument had now been observed through fourth grade eyes: a white man, glorified through stance and stature, a hero of African American people and children. It was a monument to preacher and abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher, created by sculptor John Quincy Adams Ward and dedicated in 1891 (Figure 1.1). This neighborhood fixture, invisible to most out for their morning coffee break, had in just a few minutes invigorated these young historians with burning questions, the same they had begun to ask a few weeks prior.

Figure 1.1 John Quincy Adams Ward, Henry Ward Beecher, 1891, Brooklyn, New York. “DSCN7819” by annulla is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/.

The two weeks of winter break provide a clean slate in the approximate middle of the school year. For my fourth graders, it had been an opportunity to recharge after a powerful yet challenging fall. It was the 2017–18 school year, and several tragic events of the summer of 2017 were percolating in the consciousness of these children. Mostly, these events were filtered through conversations with their parents, but they were also couched more tangentially but just as significantly in experiences. Over the summer, two students in the class had visited the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, which had opened to visitors the previous fall. They came into the classroom in September overflowing with information about our country’s history and present, information they needed to make sense of. From those first, early days, the tone was set. It would be a year of making meaning from within and about a tumultuous world.

That fall, the core focus of our social studies curriculum was essentially the same as it had been in previous years. The students learned about colonial New York and the American Revolution through trips to New York City museums, role playing, primary and secondary documents, and an overnight to a colonial mill village in upstate New York. Although the majority of these learning experiences carried over from an established curriculum, the frisson of the moment had an undeniable impact on both the teachers’ approach to the content and the students’ interaction and understanding of it. Our collective attention had been sharpened, and the schema of this particular group of children—with their awareness of racial inequities, both historical and experienced—put a spotlight on the complicated origins of our country. Their questions about systems of power rooted in race and gender, along with their willingness to consider the shaping elements of the period and the effect these had on the decisions made by those in power while demanding better, carried the undercurrent of the present. This presented the optimal problem, or dilemma, of studying the past: contending with how it intersects with today. This is especially true for children at this age.

Fourth graders are “industrious and intellectually curious … beginning to see the bigger world, including issues of fairness and justice.”¹ Regardless of the time in which they live, children of this developmental age are uniquely positioned to engage with the world beyond their immediate experience. Earlier in their lives, they found terra firma in the here and now and then later gained the ability to grapple with the history of their region. In fourth grade, these foundations converge and couple with the power to consider the globe as being rich with experiences that they cannot begin to fathom but, given the opportunity, they will try. This critical aspect of the learning life of fourth graders is rooted in a key feature of their emotional and cognitive development: the solidification of empathy, particularly in the fourth grader’s development of moral reasoning and the capacity to feel the emotions of others. It is no wonder, then, that my students had come into the year brimming with questions and worries that demanded a thoughtful and sensitive response that affirmed their importance as active participants in their world.

After sharing their learning about the colonial period and beginnings of our nation in a “Living History Museum,” the fourth graders reflected on what they had uncovered and realized. On the one hand, they were impressed, as many are, with the founders’ audacity, military feats, and confrontation of systemic injustice faced by the colonists, notably the acts and taxes implemented by the English Parliament that prevented economic and political mobility. Certain students had focused on these, while others on George Washington versus King George, the Boston Tea Party, the geography of the region and its impact on trade and culture, and so on. Others still focused on the Triangle Trade, and it was the presentation of these students that left the greatest mark. My students vocalized their confusion about the bleak quandary of how it could be that a new country with declared values of inclusion and the inherent rights of men was achieved through enslavement and oppression. What is more, they exclaimed, that oppression, from their burgeoning alertness to some of the most challenging realities of their time, had not been erased but had shifted to take on different shapes.

So, again, as fall turned to winter, we were returned to the present by way of the past. The students recalled an article from Junior Scholastic that they had read earlier in the year, which covered the debates over the problematic Confederate monuments of the South.² Now, with the scale and impact of slavery at the forefront of their thinking, they saw the dilemma of showcasing monuments to the heroes of some but certainly not all. Of course, they declared, they should come down!

As a teacher, I was thrilled. Not because of my students’ righteous indignation, but because of the opportunity it so clearly presented. My fourth grade colleagues and I realized that a study of monuments could be a catalyst for powerful understandings of relationships between self, identity, and society, and how history is experienced and conveyed. In other words, a study of monuments would center our students in history rather than relegate them to the role of observer. As educational theorist John Dewey holds, the immediacy of children’s experience provides a potent challenge:

It is part of the educator’s responsibility to see equally two things: First, that the problem grows out of the conditions of the experience being had in the present, and that it is within the range of the capacity of students; and, secondly, that it is such that it arouses in the learner an active quest for information and for production of new ideas. The new facts and new ideas thus obtained become the ground for further experiences in which new problems are presented. The process is a continuous spiral.³

Dewey’s problem is much the same as what many educators of children call an essential question: an open-ended puzzle rooted in the lives and potential of all participating learners that will lead them to deeper knowledge and meaning making. A study of monuments, particularly taken on by residents of a city with what feels like a monument on every corner, seemed primed to deliver the possibility that the young thinkers would find these in multitudes. The only challenge seemed to be where to begin.

As a study of monuments is at its core so personal and individual, the micro-context of this particular group of learners bears some unpacking. First and perhaps most significantly, they were students at a New York City independent school. From this central fact branch others: that the group of students represented a range of socioeconomic classes, but mostly included children of upper-middle-class families; that there were many races represented, but not all, and the class was predominantly white; that the school’s location and mission align with and encourage progressive politics; and that, by most American standards, the school is old—about 170 years. It was clear that all of these elements would color my students’ various experiences of the study and would ultimately rise to the surface, though I could not anticipate to what extent. As our teaching team planned for the launch of the study, we grappled with which of the innumerable monuments in the city we could explore first. The enormous number of choices along with the emotionally and intellectually challenging history of many of them left us feeling temporarily at a loss. Then, it dawned on us that our particular context could be an asset. We decided to start with the most accessible set of monuments for this group, a set with which they would all be able to emotionally connect without initial background teaching: the various monuments found within our Pre-K to twelfth grade school.

The study began with the most foundational question: What is a monument? In the classroom, students “chalk talked” on chart paper, writing their own ideas and responding to those of their classmates through writing. We posted the charts, messy but full, in front of the classroom and looked for themes. It emerged from the students’ examples and thinking that monuments are objects (sometimes sculptures, sometimes plaques, sometimes buildings, and more) that celebrate someone’s life, especially if that life involved positive contributions to their community. We were in as good a place as any to venture out on a monument search, a walking trip within our school.

The idea of the walking trip as a uniquely powerful instrument of learning was given American form and language by Bank Street College of Education founder Lucy Sprague Mitchell. Mitchell was both rebelling against the traditional, sermonic education she had received as a child—which espoused the idea of the child as a passive “sponge,” a phrase our country has not yet shaken—and responding to her context: Depression-era New York. The walking trips she took with young children and student teachers around the city, in which they interacted with all elements of their environment, provided both with the chance to actively participate in their own learning. Mitchell’s walking trips helped define American progressive education and have been a source of inspiration for generations of teacher leaders ever since. As educator Sal Vascellero explained, “I saw how the concept of the trips offered an expansive way of thinking about educating teachers and children: a pedagogy spearheaded b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction to Teachable Monuments: Why Monuments Matter
• Part I: Teaching Strategies
• Part II: Political Strategies
• Part III: Engagement Strategies
• Index
• Imprint