Teaching Resources: Integrating Visual Arts: Humanities and Social Sciences Classrooms

Just as they enrich our lives, the visual arts have wonderful potential to stimulate students’ imaginations, intercultural understanding, and knowledge of other academic subjects.  The following selections from the EAA archives should prove helpful for teachers and students from a wide range of academic disciplines including anthropology, history, communications, religion, philosophy, and art history courses. Each teaching resource essay has rich visuals, most include teaching questions and resources, and all can be useful for face-to-face and digital learning.  

• Calligraphy in East Asia: Art, Communication, and Symbology is an ideal introductory overview of brush calligraphy’s powerful influence on East Asia.
• Ainu-e: Instructional Resources for the Study of Japan’s Other People is a skillful integration of images and supporting narrative that makes for a vivid depiction of a culture that in important ways impacts teacher and students’ knowledge of Japan and understanding of the first North Americans.
• Cultivating Enlightenment: The Manifold Meaning of Japanese Zen Gardens is an excellent visual and narrative introduction to Japanese Zen, and perhaps its most iconic symbols.
• Japanese Art for the Classroom: Images, Texts, and Notes for Teachers both assists teachers to use art in multiple ways and includes Japan-related case studies applicable to several academic subjects.
• In An Environmental Ethic in Chinese Landscape Painting, author Shelley Drake Hawks manages to create a practical but meaningful multidisciplinary educational resource.
• AP Art History and Chinese Art: Lisa Hirkaler teaches AP Art History but her chronological arrangement of images make this resource essay applicable to World History and AP World History teachers and students as well.

Other Teaching Resources: “Teaching China with the Smithsonian”

Recently, the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, announced the launch of a new website designed by educators, for educators titled “Teaching China with the Smithsonian.” The website explores one of the world’s oldest civilizations through museum objects, lesson plans, videos, web interactives, and other resources relevant for world history, social studies, visual arts, and language arts curricula in grades five through twelve. Discover objects from the Freer and Sackler collections, essays on aspects of Chinese history, and interdisciplinary lesson plans written by teachers from the Washington, DC area and across the United States. The site features extensive multimedia resources including videos highlighting art and craft traditions, an interactive map and timeline, interactive artworks, and more!