Student Projects & Adaptations: Ross Elementary

Summary:

Karen Jones and Suheir Saikaly worked together with sixth grade students to explore collecting practices in the content areas of Social Studies and Art. Their adapted lessons focus on comparing and contrasting art and culture from ancient Egypt and 20th-century America. Saikaly and Jones used additional grant monies to bring representatives from The Carnegie Museum of Natural History, the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, and The Andy Warhol Museum to their school. Their project’s emphasis was on the diverse ways (visual, verbal, and written) in which culture is communicated. Students studied Andy Warhol’s art, life, and use of modern images as a means of communication, and then in Social Studies class they compared these modern images with artifacts from ancient Egypt. The natural history museum brought objects from their Egyptian loan collection for students to examine and use as source material for their own artworks, creative written work, and poetry. Students also used photographic silkscreen techniques to create collages of their personal collections of contemporary cultural “artifacts.” As a result, students were introduced to museum conservation and the ways in which three diverse museums collect and store their objects.