Yale Center for British Art Summer Teacher Institute Serves Local Educators, Sustains and Supports Arts-Based Education in New Haven

Among their many virtues, teachers have excellent eyes. They might spot a raised hand from across the room, catch a curricular problem area before it stumps their students, or notice a schoolyard friendship before it blooms. For the Yale Center for British Art, it’s exciting to help teachers bring their natural discernment to informed engagement with art. In fact, learning from teachers’ unique insights is one of the many pleasures of the YCBA’s annual New Haven Summer Teacher Institute.  

Every summer, the YCBA welcomes teachers from the Greater New Haven area into the museum for three days of free educational collaboration, no matter the teacher’s grade level, background, or experience. The goal of the Summer Teacher Institute, launched some twenty years ago by YCBA Senior Educator for Engagement Linda Friedlaender, is to enhance observation skills and help teachers learn how museum visits can strengthen their curricula, establishing the YCBA as a destination for both teacher and student growth.

This year’s institute focused on “expanding literacies by using the museum as an extension of their classroom.” In the museum, “expanding literacies” means building visual literacy, or the ability to describe images and to question, interpret, and evaluate their meaning. As one of this year’s teachers observed, visual literacy’s importance lies in its ability to “build observation skills that are not [otherwise] taught in classrooms.”  

Often, teachers are asked to move quickly through their curriculum to cover the content students need to learn in a particular year. In conversations within the institute, several participants mentioned that it can be difficult to find the time necessary to build this skill through the careful observation of art. One teacher from this year’s Institute confessed that in the past they “moved too quickly when analyzing art with students” and concluded that the institute helped them realize they “need to give students the opportunity to take more time and to really observe slowly.”  

The institute’s schedule offered the time and guidance necessary for its participants to get into the rhythm of close observation. Throughout the program, the teachers engaged with artworks through deep, rigorous observation, and they applied their growing visual literacy skills to open up discussions of satire, race, economics, legacies of violence, and other crucial themes through artworks.

The second goal of the institute was to extend learning beyond the classroom. The paintings and sculptures in the display Loyalists and Sons of Liberty: America 250 offered a rich jumping-off point. Its subject matter—the American Revolution—is commonly taught in classrooms, and as Pilar Forrest, the YCBA’s Postgraduate Research Associate for Paintings and Sculpture, pointed out, the display was “designed for a broad audience.”

The teachers were able to explore the exhibit alongside its curators, Forrest and Edward Town, Associate Curator of Paintings and Sculpture, YCBA. The experience “reaffirmed the expansive possibilities of object-based learning,” Forrest said, adding, “I hope we can continue to build upon this work through continued collaboration with our community’s educators.”  

Friedlaender added that she “tried to make [the] teachers aware of the unique benefits of seeing primary source materials in real life, in real time. . . . The way objects are contextualized, or displayed in a museum, adds another level of information and learning which is impossible to get using only reproductions.”

The institute culminated with group tours, in which the teachers utilized their newly practiced close-looking skills to guide their peers as they might guide their students in the coming school year. Sharing their takeaways from the experience, one teacher said that they gained the confidence necessary to bring students to the museum and felt supported in their efforts to make their classrooms more “student-centered and inquiry-focused.” Another teacher mused that they “want to spend more time building a curriculum with what they learned.”

The Summer Teacher Institute also offered YCBA staff and leaders the invaluable opportunity to learn from New Haven educators about how the museum can continue to support local schools.  

YCBA Paul Mellon Director Martina Droth, who met with the teachers on their first day at the museum, noted that "our New Haven teachers know better than anyone what their students need. The Summer Teacher Institute is our way of welcoming them into the museum, to use art in ways that will be useful to them and their students in the coming school year. I’m excited to see them return with their classes—and to see what questions and ideas their students bring into our galleries."

About the Yale Center for British Art 

Opened in 1977 through the generosity of Yale graduate and philanthropist Paul Mellon, the Yale Center for British Art holds the largest and most significant collection of British art outside the United Kingdom. The collection spans more than five centuries and is the foundation for a museum uniquely focused on the histories, legacies, and shifting contexts of British art. Housed in a celebrated modernist building designed by Louis I. Kahn, the museum is situated on the Yale University campus in the city of New Haven. It is free and open to all.

General Information

The Yale Center for British Art is located at 1080 Chapel Street, New Haven, Connecticut. The museum is open Tuesday–Saturday, 10 am – 5 pm, and Sunday, 11 am – 5 pm. The YCBA is closed Mondays and major holidays. 

Story written by Samantha Kopkowski, Yale Center for British Art