WRITING WITH ARTIFACTS: THE VIRTUAL MUSEUM AND THE ACADEMIC ESSAY
Vivian Kao, Lawrence Technological University
The intersection of museums and writing has been generative for writing studies scholarship. Chaim Noy (2019), for example, analyzes the writing practices of museum visitors, and Jennifer Blunden (2019) of curators, while Jamie White-Farnham (2012) and Shari Sabeti (2015) read museum placards and objects in relation to public and creative writing. Less attention, however, has been given to the use of virtual museums in writing studies and in writing pedagogy specifically.
This photo essay derives from an assignment given in a sophomore literature course at a technological university in the U.S. Midwest. The assignment directs students to create a virtual museum exhibit using free and accessible software such as Artsteps or Google Slides Virtual Museum to explore the connections between museum curation and academic writing. The assignment emphasizes the importance of purpose and design in composing all sorts of texts, from the written to the multimodal. It encourages students to consider how elements of effective academic writing such as argument, unity, coherence, and development can be applied across a range of humanist intellectual products.
The course, titled “World Masterpieces 2: Encountering Modernity,” is the second of a two-course literature sequence required of all students, most of whom are engineering, business, and architecture majors. The course covers world literature and art from 1600 to the present, and includes Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017). Course themes include globalization, immigration, and dislocation; colonialism and postcolonialism; and the relationship between literary-artistic movements from the Enlightenment to postmodernism. The course’s first two essay assignments are traditional literary analyses; the virtual museum comprises the final essay and final project.
The assignment instructs students to use their virtual exhibit to engage meaningfully with a question, theme, character, or other significant aspect of a text of their choice from the course’s second half. Exhibits must contain three rooms with three artifacts in each room. Artifacts can be images of two- or three-dimensional art, or musical, electronic, or multimodal media. Students are directed to think of each room as a “body paragraph” that uses well-chosen “evidence”—in this case, artifacts—to support a main claim. The assignment states,
Like a body paragraph in an academic essay, all of the objects in a room should be about a single topic (unity), and the objects should be arranged in way that develops the argument you want to make about that topic (coherence). The three rooms put together, and the order in which the visitor experiences the rooms, supports and develops the overall “thesis” you are proposing about your text(s). (Kao 2020)
Students present their finished projects, “walking” their classmates and instructor through their exhibits, and finally, turn in a polished written version of their oral presentation that explains the main claims advanced in each room, how each object contributes to those claims, and how the rooms taken together illustrate the exhibit’s main argument. In my experience, in-person and virtual presentations (using Zoom’s share-screen feature) have been equally thoughtful and effective.
Virtual museums are promising platforms for teaching literature and academic writing, and for encouraging students to connect their humanities and major-program courses. Assignments utilizing virtual museums have much to offer scholarship on transfer, multimodal composition, and the pandemic-era virtual classroom.
Figures 1-4. Images from a project by Mark Zammit exploring the use of color in realism.
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Figures 5-6. Images from a project by Dale Sharp exploring the power of despair and other negative emotions as a catalyst for character development.
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Figures 7-9. Images from a project by Thomas Kaminski exploring the notion that decay is both repugnant and pleasant in several course texts.
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Figures 10-13. Images from a project by Madison Bologna exploring the development of the female protagonist in Exit West.
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References
Blunden, J. (2019). Bridge or barrier? Writing in secondary art & design education in the UK. International Journal of Art and Design Education, 38(4), 916–926.
Bologna, M. ‘Phases of Nadia’s life’ museum. (2020). World Masterpieces 2. Lawrence Technological University, student project.
Kao, V. (2020). World Masterpieces 2 final project and essay: Assignment instructions. World Masterpieces 2. Lawrence Technological University.
Kaminski, T. (2020). Decay. World Masterpieces 2. Lawrence Technological University, student project.
Noy, C. (2015). Writing in museums: Toward a rhetoric of participation. Written Communication, 32(3), 195–219.
Sabeti, S. (2015). ‘Inspired to be creative?’: Persons, objects, and the public pedagogy of museums. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 46(2), 113–128.
Sharp, D. (2020). World Masterpieces final. World Masterpieces 2. Lawrence Technological University, student project.
Walton, J., Paradies, Y., & Mansouri, F. (2016). Towards reflexive ethnicity: Museums as sites of intercultural encounter. British Educational Research Journal, 42(5), 871–889.
White-Farnham, J. (2012). Writing 302: Writing culture. Composition Studies, 40(2), 92-111.
Zammit, M. (2020). World Masterpieces 2 project. World Masterpieces 2. Lawrence Technological University, student project.
Vivian Kao is associate professor of English and coordinator of the first-year writing program at Lawrence Technological University. Her research interests include the teaching and learning of humanities and composition at STEM universities, literature/film adaptation, and the Victorian colonial novel. She is the author of Postcolonial Screen Adaptation and the British Novel (Palgrave Macmillan 2020) and co-editor of Writing STEAM: Composition, STEM, and a New Humanities (Routledge 2022). Her articles have appeared in Teaching English in the Two-Year College, Composition Forum, Interdisciplinary Humanities, Scholarship and Practice of Undergraduate Research, and various literature journals.