After teaching AP Art History for many years, Emily Snyder began to feel like students were speeding from prehistoric cave drawings to post-1980s contemporary art, barreling past Pacific Island royal architecture and impressionism in an all-out sprint toward the finish: the AP exam. “It felt like it was all about the exam and not about the depth of the learning,” she shares. “The shift to Advanced Studies has really given me the opportunity to center the student experience and make thoughtful decisions about how and what I teach.”

For Emily, one of the most invigorating elements of the new perspective on advanced learning has been the connection with other faculty—hearing what they’re doing, getting ideas, and helping one another. “Coming up with cool ideas and getting feedback has been so enjoyable and exciting,” Emily shares. “It’s helpful to see how others approach problems.” 

During the week-long collaborative curriculum design process, Emily focused on embedding experiences that would be authentic and meaningful for students. The exercise is helping her decide what pieces of the former curriculum to keep. “It’s clear that some of the cross-cultural comparisons that I’ve been doing in the AP class are things I want to continue,” Emily explains. In addition to a traditional chronological arrangement of content, she will focus on elements that tie together thematically. “While exploring Romanesque cathedrals, we’ll pause to look at Buddhist architecture and reliquary designed for pilgrimage to compare it alongside the European tradition.” 

One of the most appealing features of the new class design is that students will have more choice. “If we’re focused on non-western pieces, students will have the opportunity to choose whether they want to explore the Pacific Islands or colonial Latin America. We’ll be able to dive deeper into those moments,” Emily explains. 

With the added flexibility, Emily envisions her students engaging in a robust classroom experience that involves more writing, reflecting, revising, and analyzing. ”I’m interested in making this class more about developing the vocabulary and analytical skills necessary to contextualize and understand different works of art and to apply that knowledge in a real-world setting,” Emily says. “Are you able to think about a contemporary problem related to art history, develop a solution, and communicate your ideas in an effective way?” 

Emily points out that this approach to art history requires a higher level of thinking skills than focusing on an exam, giving students the opportunity to test their skills in a different way,  listening to feedback and working collaboratively. “For art history in particular, many people take the class because they are visual artists and have a creative mindset. Memorizing and regurgitating isn’t necessarily the way they best express what they know,” Emily says. By moving beyond a focus on testing, art history becomes accessible to all students and allows them to demonstrate their knowledge in new and creative ways.

In the inaugural Advanced Studies Art History class, Emily is excited to dive into project-based learning. Students will propose a public monument to replace the statue of Teddy Roosevelt flanked by an Indigenous person and an African man, which is soon to be removed from the entrance of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. “The project is based on something I’ve been thinking about for a couple of years,” Emily reveals. “I want to try to get kids to think about public monuments specifically from an art history lens.” She feels that this approach puts students at the center of the classroom experience by giving them a tangible way to apply what they are learning. 

Beyond this year’s public monuments project, Emily dreams of engaging students in conversations about the repatriation of objects acquired during colonial and imperialist periods. “Kids are engaged in the type of work that has a social justice lens,” she says. “Where we are in upstate New York, there are many conversations about who has the right and responsibility to own and care for objects.” Emily’s students are passionate about exploring why there are mummies in Albany and what can be done about pot hunters who steal indigenous artifacts from burial grounds, what it takes to get them returned, and how communities collaborate in a way that is valued and appreciated. “There is a lot of work to do in this local area,” Emily shares. “I imagine we could collaborate with US history classes to imagine a different way of looking at the relationship between the US government and Indigenous people.”

Emily’s work in Student Life has also given her a birds-eye view of the toll that stress and anxiety take on student wellbeing. “For so long, I watched kids fall apart before, during, and after AP week because of the stress it puts on them,” she recalls. “They stop sleeping, stop taking care of themselves, and generally struggle so much more because of the stress of the exams.” By engaging students in academic pursuits that align with their personal passions, Emily believes we can help alleviate that pressure. “I’m hoping that the new approach to advanced learning restores the joy our students have in learning!”