RMA Project: Reflections

When this project began I was worried that my lack of experience would be a detriment to my group. I have never done a project like this before and my experience with art history is limited at best. Luckily my group, consisting of Devorah Burgess and Sarah Bousfield, were so kind and accommodating that this daunting task. We worked together picking just the right pieces that would make our collection complete. Individually we picked our media and we got together to defend why it worked with our theme. Which was so much fun!

One of the problems we faced throughout the process of creating this portfolio was communication. Not between ourselves as a group. When you are having to get feedback from multiple sources it can be hard to find time in multiple peoples schedules in order to get the feedback that we needed in a timely fashion. When working on any Public History field that is bound to be a problem everyone runs into. I'm thankful I have been working on my patience as this can be frustrating throughout.

Like I mentioned earlier patience is a skill required of any Public Historian. I learned so many other skills while working on this project. I had never really dug through a collection before to truly analyze the themes of the artwork. Looking at how each painting would contribute to K-12 curriculums was truly eye opening. Being able to add that to our project truly made this special for me. Something I didn't think I would realize is just how interdisciplinary this project was going to be. Between art history, anthropology, science, geography we were able to use our knowledge of other subjects to create a great portfolio that utilized so many different areas of interest.

This was my first project of this type. I was really nervous about it start to finish but as I look at the completed project I am completely amazing at what we created at a team. Not only do I see why these teaching portfolios exist but I am so grateful to have been given the opportunity to contribute to their portfolios. My fears going in were completely unfounded and through working with these two wonderful women I gained the confidence to go out there and try to involve and contribute to more projects like this in the future!

Stay tuned for me to post the final project soon!