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 a few years ago gave me the opportunity to center the student experience and make thoughtful decisions about how and what I teach.”

During the week-long collaborative curriculum design process, Ms. Snyder focused on embedding experiences that would be authentic and meaningful for students. In addition to a traditional chronological arrangement of content, she focuses on elements that tie together thematically. “While exploring Romanesque cathedrals, we 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 AS class design is that students have more choice. “If we’re focused on non-Western pieces, students have the opportunity to choose whether they want to explore the Pacific Islands or colonial Latin America. We are able to dive deeper into those moments,” Emily explains. 

With the flexibility, Ms. Snyder sees her students engaging in a robust classroom experience that involves writing, reflecting, revising, and analyzing. ”We get to write essays that better reflect the depth required in a college classroom. We can compare religious architecture across cultures or dive more deeply into the connection between art and culture in a particular time and place,” Ms. Snyder says. “The exam-centered model didn’t emphasize the quality of student writing, and now I can focus on giving students space to improve the structure and argument of an analytical essay. The growth I see over the course of the year is impressive!”

Ms. Snyder 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. Since the course began, students have pursued a collaborative final project that requires them to address an issue relevant to the contemporary art world. This year, the project will focus on the ethics and practical concerns surrounding the repatriation of objects. Students will choose a work of art, research its history and the debate regarding its repatriation, and then design a museum exhibit for the object that incorporates what they have learned.

“Students often do their best work of the year on this project,” Ms. Snyder notes. “They appreciate the chance to apply what they have learned to an area they are passionate about, they enjoy working with each other to solve a problem, and their exhibits are creative and polished.” She feels that this kind of project puts students at the center of the classroom experience by giving them a tangible way to apply what they are learning.

Read more about what alumnae of Ms. Snyder's class have to say here!