As someone who teaches writing and rhetoric, I am interested in talking about how we can create partnerships between museums and literature and composition classrooms in higher-ed. I’ve had some wonderful success teaching the museum or museum exhibits as texts in first-year composition. As rhetorical constructs with a purpose, intended audience, historical and social context, etc., that often integrate multiple modes (written, oral, visual, electronic) and media (video, interactive digital displays, podcasts, sculpture) museum exhibits offer particularly exciting opportunities for defamiliarizing and examining rhetorical concepts and the communication affordances of different modes and media. As public spaces in which learning takes place outside of the classroom, museums potentially offer extraordinary service-learning opportunities that might engage students in the production and curation of culture and knowledge.
Now, I’m not talking about getting undergraduates involved in mounting an exhibit at the High. Instead, I’m thinking about how curators from the High might work with a class, or two, or three at someplace like Georgia Tech to mount an exhibit in a public space on campus that relates the subject matter of the course and provides students with an opportunity to hone communication strategies while engaging in public discourse. At Georgia Tech, one of my colleagues, Doris Bremm is currently working with the Ferst Center gallery on an exhibition of student work. Are there other similar projects out there? Are there any potential sources of funding to help encourage and finance this sort of collaboration? Is this even something museum professionals might find interesting? Finally, how is this sort of work related to the work or work-ethic of the Digital Humanities? If anyone else would like to talk about and maybe even answer some of these questions, we could organize a session around them.
