Teaching Historical Style

I hear parents complain that it’s difficult to teach children about historical styles in the arts. Let’s use, as an example, historical styles of architecture. Does this sound familiar?

How am I ever going to teach these architectural styles to my kids? It’s boring for them to look at pictures of old buildings. Plus, I don’t know much about this kind of thing myself.

There’s a reason your kids are bored by looking at pictures of buildings, and it isn’t your teaching. Taking in the details of any three-dimensional art form via a two-dimensional medium (picture) can be challenging under any circumstance. But for young students who are just starting to build vocabularies and skill at discerning what they see, learning something as dynamic as “style” in this manner may not succeed.

Other than bundling everyone up and flying to Paris, Prague, or London, what’s a mother to do? Start with what you have. That’s right. Teach what is in front of your children’s eyes. Let me explain.

Virtually every community has a variety of architectural styles. We may not consider the buildings we see daily to be examples of specific architectural styles, but they are.

The old corner building now housing an insurance office could turn out to be one of the architectural gems known as Sullivan’s Jewel Boxes, or may have been influenced by this American architect’s ideas. Enjoying meteoric fame as father of the 19th-century skyscraper (most famously the Wainwright Building in St. Louis), Louis Sullivan (1856-1924) lived long enough to see his designs superseded. He ended his life relying on small commissions, some of which still stand in Midwest cities, residents unaware of their historical importance.

But even if the structures in your town aren’t “important” or don’t reflect the trickle-down effect of innovative ideas, they are still architectural structures. They have foundations, walls, doors, roofs, cornices, and eaves. They are built of bricks, concrete, masonry, glass, metal, or wood. They have height, width, depth, color, and décor (no matter how plain), as well as intended functions, whether a 1920s courthouse, the now-shoddy 7-11 building from the 1980s, or the brand-new wing of the hospital.

So how should a student investigate these structures? To facilitate learning, I always return to the basic questions: “who, what, when, where, why, and how.” To this list, I add my favorite: “so what?”

Far too often in the arts, we start our teaching with “who.” Adults like knowing the answer to “who”: Beethoven composed this, but Bach composed that. Or, Monet painted this and Rembrandt painted that.

Names are fine, and ultimately important. But initially, names mean little to nothing to kids. One might as well take a preschooler into a grocery store and say: “Here’s a box of Betty Crocker, there’s a bottle of Paul Newman.”

The child wants to know what kind of food is in the containers, not who grew or packaged it. He wants to know if the food is sweet or salty, spicy or crunchy, smooth or textured. Primarily, he wants to figure out if he likes it or not.

Kids cannot taste buildings, but they are born with a taste for the materials out of which things are constructed. They are natural builders and enjoy grappling with the basic concepts of structures, including textures, color, dimensions, and detail. They also are good at evaluating whether a structure “works” (or tries to work). You might say that exploring such concrete aspects of a building would be equivalent to a taste test for food.

Yes, at some point, students will need to understand and define Romanesque and Gothic. They will have to gather a vocabulary, and learn the architects. But they ought first to develop basic strategies for seeing how buildings are made and changed. Let them first look at a cathedral window and decide if it is arched or not. Let them compare that window with an earlier, rounded one, now bricked up. And then have them practice making decisions about what might have happened to both windows across time.

No ancient cathedrals in your town? That’s okay, because you can see some of those same features reflected in local churches (such as New Brighton Methodist Church, New Brighton, Pennsylvania). And every town has buildings that have been remodeled and repurposed. The same pedagogy can be applied to these buildings, no matter what they are.

Quirky facts help in teaching architecture, too, as any teacher knows. “Did you know that Tsar Ivan IV had the architect blinded after he completed St. Basil’s Cathedral?” (Yes, it’s true, and, in fact, this kind of response isn’t unique in history.) “Can you see that the street level once was a full story lower?” Or, “Think about how palaces had corridors between the walls where the servants could pass to fuel the heaters (and eavesdrop mercilessly on the aristocracy).”

Architectural disaster stories work well too, such as what happened when those flying buttresses failed, or when massive vaults due to an architect’s overreach collapsed. The more physical and vivid the information, the better.

Once some of this groundwork is laid, it’s easier to add in additional questions. Of those questions, the “when” word (chronology) presents a stumbling block for many children.

Yes, kids do need to learn dates. They are quite capable of learning lots and lots of dates. They profit from knowing dates. But introducing topics by focusing on “when” can stymie young learners even more than “who.” When you’re nine years old, you have no idea what 200 years ago means. And when dates predominate the historical discussion, many a child will give up.

Chronology certainly can come alive in a child’s mind, particularly after the concept of imagery is planted in the understanding. Combining chronology with mnemonic devices or choreographed movements helps too. (I’m quite a fan of the “history rap” developed by Classical Conversations: it’s clever, fun, plus it sticks for a lifetime.) Other children will do well with timelines, flash cards, or the integrating of chronological facts into other forms of narrative, such as bedtime stories of kings and heroes.

Primarily, though, the goal in teaching historical style in the arts is to enhance the child’s powers of observation, encourage curiosity, and fuel speculation. Have faith in the examples around you. Things need not be famous or important to serve as gems for teaching.

Focus your attention initially on the “what” and the “how.” Turn your child’s imagination loose on the “why.” And let the material lead naturally to a child’s favorite question: “so what?”

The same approach can be used with other arts. Your local gallery might not be filled with Rembrandts, but your child will be more engaged by paintings that are physically present, including art that increasingly appears in public spaces and on the walls in local businesses. Your town’s high school orchestra may not be playing the Brahms symphonies, but they are performing live. Art can be found everywhere you look, and every encounter with art is an opportunity.