The Harvard Art Museums seek up to six new Graduate Student Teachers (GSTs) to join our year-long high school gallery teaching program. This program is offered by the museums’ Division of Academic and Public Programs (DAPP) in collaboration with the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School (CRLS), Cambridge’s only public high school. GSTs explore different approaches to gallery teaching for high school students, build multi-visit partnerships with high school teachers, use visual art as a tool for teaching a variety of academic subjects, and help develop and foster a museum-going identity and museum literacy among local teens. The program is open to all Harvard University graduate students interested in object-based interdisciplinary teaching at the high school level. This is a year-long commitment, with the possibility to continue for a second year for those enrolled at Harvard in 2027–28.
Program components:
• Graduate Student Teachers (GSTs) will work collaboratively to develop and lead interactive gallery lessons for CRLS students that promote close observation, critical thinking, and deep engagement with the museums’ collections.
• GSTs will teach CRLS students how museums can become resources for their academic and personal growth. They will actively contribute to the development of a museum-going identity among CRLS students, including through a program designed to familiarize 9th-graders with the museums and how they work.
• GSTs will partner closely with individual CRLS teachers and classes, creating semester-long multi-visit partnerships that build museum literacy for students and link the museums’ collections to course curricula in subjects such as studio art, Spanish language, and world history.
• GSTs will be matched with between one and three classes per semester, teaching approximately three lessons for each class. Some classes have multiple sections; GSTs can therefore expect to teach approximately 2–3 in-classroom pre-visits and 9–12 gallery visits per semester.
• GSTs will collaborate with their cohort throughout their time in the program, workshopping their lesson plans in a group setting and teaching their CRLS lessons in pairs or groups of three.
• GSTs may have the opportunity to participate in other object-based learning programs for young people.
• GSTs will participate in assessment and self-assessment of their teaching.
• Training will draw on scholarship from art history, museum pedagogy, and a variety of other fields. GSTs will build their own museum literacy by learning directly from educators, curators, conservators, and each other during behind-the-scenes museum tours, workshops, and weekly training sessions.
• Program participants will gain valuable object-based teaching experience and research skills; develop a portfolio of lesson plans that demonstrates a broad knowledge of object-based teaching; apply the approaches learned in weekly training sessions to CRLS class visits; and acquire valuable experience developing multi-visit museum/classroom partnerships.
