SARTS Annual Meeting & Events 2014

We hope you will join SARTS in San Diego this November (2014) for any or all of these events.

PRE-MEETING WORKSHOP: Teaching Visual Arts in Religious Studies and Theology Classrooms

Friday, November 21st
1:00-5:00 p.m.
San Diego Ballroom Salon C

Join SARTS at a Wabash Center co-sponsored workshop on "Teaching Visual Arts in Religious Studies and Theology Classrooms." The session will be led by David Morgan (Duke University) and Vivian-Lee Nyitray (Prospect College, China), and is presided over by Wilson Yates (United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities) and Paul Myhre (Wabash Center).

This workshop will provide faculty with various strategies and methods for teaching the visual arts in religious studies and theology classrooms. Participants will explore a range of ways by which specific pedagogical methods can help students engage the visual arts as loci for the study of religious studies, theology, ethics, bible, etc. Specific attention will be given to the following pedagogical methods: a dialogical method that sees artist, art, and the viewer (theologian, ethicists, whoever) in conversation with the viewer drawing on material from other disciplines; a method that considers the role of material evidence, which means beginning with methodological questions in order to engage students (and colleagues no less) in the definition of evidence in historical and cultural analysis; and a method that attends to the ethics of observation as part of the hermeneutics of visual cultures, including the viewer's gaze.

Workshop participants will explore both meta-level questions about engaging the visual arts and explore specific strategies for teaching visual arts in contemporary higher educational contexts through a range of questions. The pre-meeting workshop will include mini-lectures, plenary conversations, and small group work. In addition, participants will be exposed to materials for study and teaching including: methods of visual analysis, ethics of inquiry, exhibition practices, subject areas (Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, etc.), theories of visual culture, and so on.

Pre-registration Required: Limited to 50 faculty participants. Contact: Trish Overpeck, overpecp@wabash.edu. Click here for more information.