Introduction to the Curriculum:
The Center for Brooklyn History education department invited Fred Wilson to talk with a group of teens about his career and philosophies as an artist. The curriculum below uses the discussion to help students think about how to use art to explore history. Each section of the curriculum can be done independently of the others, and centers around themes that Fred Wilson explores in his work.
Goals
Our hope with this curriculum is to inspire students to create artistic pieces that commemorate a specific time, theme, and/or story of Brooklyn’s diverse past, or the area where they live. This curriculum can be adapted to work with the history of all areas.
About This Curriculum:
It is divided into the following sections, and can be taught chronologically or out of order.
- Who is Fred Wilson?
- Learning from the Full Fred Wilson CBH Interview
- Inspired by Wilson: Mining History Through Juxtapositions
- Connections with other CBH curriculum
- Inspired by Wilson: Brooklyn Memorials
Suggested Teaching Tools for Online Learning
We suggest using Padlet and Jamboard as interactive online learning tools with this curriculum. You can add the links to Padlet and have students write comments about each of the sources. With Jamboard, placing one of the primary sources on the board and/or having students listen to an oral history or watch one of the contextual videos enables them to write their thoughts on virtual post-it notes.
A special thank you to Mr. Fred Wilson for allowing us to record his talk with teens, and use his work to teach students how to create rememberance. Thank you to More Art for working with us to bring life to this curriculum. Also, thank you to Julia Maranto for creating this curriculum with advisors Dan Meharg and Emily Connuck. Mr. Jules David Bartkowski thank you for your mad skills with videography and editing. Thank you.