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Published: March 1999.
Web Site of the New Museum of Contemporary Art
Donna Gesualdo , New Museum of Contemporary Art, USASession: Demonstrations 2
The New Museum's Visible Knowledge Program is a collaboration among Museum staff and high school teachers, students, and artists in selected New York City public schools. It's specifically designed to bring diverse cultural perspectives into public high school curricula. Since 1984, VKP has paired artist/instructors with high school educators and their students on a semester-long basis, with the goal of exploring new ways to integrate contemporary art with social studies, language arts, and other core high school curricula.
On this Web site… You'll find classroom-ready Curriculum Units adapted from past VKP collaborations and from the book, Contemporary Art and Multicultural Education-and cyber-classrooms and studios where you can visit current collaborations in process. If you're interested in using VKP Curriculum Units with your own students, you can download them right from this site…e-mail questions and comments to teachers, artists, and museum educators involved in the program…and even open on-line classrooms and studios yourself. And each Curriculum Unit comes with its own bulletin board, where you can exchange ideas with other classes that are using the same Curriculum Unit-around the country or around the world. You can also visit our Resource Library and Galleries, where you'll find all the resources for the Curriculum Units, including artists' works and statements, and more.
Ultimately, the goal of the Visible Knowledge Program (VKP) and consequently the VKP Web site is replication and dissemination of information. We want teachers/educators to be able to use this site as a guide in the implementation or replication of interdisciplinary contemporary art programs globally and/or as a resource tool, thereby reaching under-served and distant audiences whom otherwise would not benefit from the fruits of our collaborative efforts. Ideally, teachers will be able to incorporate the activities and lesson plans from the site into their own classes and have the opportunity to discuss them with other users on the site. Additional resources for teachers will include documentation of the teaching process, bibliographies, web links to related sites, and the opportunity to communicate with participants in the program and other educators via e-mail and bulletin boards. Elements of the site will be appealing to a younger audience, as there will be a student gallery of work produced by participants in the program and exhibited at the Museum. Of course, it also serves as exposure for the Museum and its Education department and creates a forum for dialogue among educators about current issues in art/museum education.