This four-week, 2009 Summer Institute for Teachers (July 12 - August 8)
at UMass Dartmouth will use
Winslow Homer’s paintings as the point of departure for a voyage of
discovery about maritime history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We will travel spectacular coastal New England in search of the inspiration and origins of Homer's archetypal images.
Our goal is not only to understand
the period historically and culturally, but also to explore multiple source
materials for discovering the past, including works of art and literature,
objects, landscapes, the built environment, descendant communities and a range
of historical documents in order to synthesize these various perspectives.
Participants will develop cross-disciplinary lessons and teaching materials for classrooms.
Full
Day by Day Schedule (PDF)
OVERVIEW
Week One: Sailors and the Sea
Winslow Homer’s fishing paintings are filled with well rendered vessels,
navigational tools, the technology of fish catching, and weather. Our first
week will be spent in a study of these subjects. A fishing schooner of the
type most frequently depicted by Homer survives in nearby New Bedford, the
Ernestina (formerly the Effie Morrisey).
After our morning introductions, we will proceed on the first day to the New
Bedford waterfront to see that vessel, surrounded by the working trawlers
and draggers of the local fleet. We will walk the nearby waterfront historic
district to see how a harbor and its supporting neighborhood is laid out,
and we will go from there to one of the nearby beaches of Buzzards Bay to
compare the built landscape of the maritime world to the natural landscape.
The next day we will hear from Visiting Scholar Thomas Puryear, Chancellor
Professor of Art History Emeritus,
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth who will present a slide talk on “Architecture
and Maritime History in 19th Century New Bedford,” We will travel on
Thursday to Boston for a visit to the Museum of Fine Arts to see “The
Fog Warning” and “Long Branch” and to compare these with
paintings of New England harbors and waterfronts by other artists, including
Fitz Henry Lane and Robert Salmon.
We will talk about how to “read” a painting, not only as a work
of art, but also as a historical, cultural, and sociological text. What information can we derive from Homer’s paintings
about technology, social trends, and perceptions of nature in his age? Institute
discussion topics in Week One include “New England Fishery Technologies,”
“Weather for the Mariner,” and “Celestial Navigation.”
Our central reading will be Kipling’s Captains Courageous, supported
by the 1884 U.S. Government publication The New England Fisheries by George
Brown Goode. On Friday morning, we will be joined by international Scholar
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Prince of the Asturias Professor of Spanish Culture
and Civilization at Tufts University and author of many notable books, who
will talk about The Atlantic World: A Context for the New England Maritimes.
In the afternoon we will discuss Kipling’s Captains Courageous, and
follow that by the 1938 film version. Friday evening members of ‘The
Fishermen’s Family Association’ will join us for a potluck supper
and light conversation.
Week Two: Seafaring Culture
New England
mariners left a remarkably rich legacy of documents and artifacts that entered
into museum collections. The New Bedford Whaling Museum has the largest collection
in the world of shipboard logbooks and journals, representing nineteenth-century
whaling voyages to every part of the globe, as well as an astonishing collection
of the shipboard productions of American mariners, including scrimshaw, folk
paintings, tools, models, and photographs. This week, we will go to the Museum’s
galleries and visit the Kendall Research Institute for discussion sessions
on Tuesday and Wednesday. We will use Dana’s text The Seaman’s
Friend as our principal text, augmented by discourse on Malloy’s “African
Americans in Maritime Trades.” An early evening concert on Tuesday will
present the songs sung at sea, as transcribed in the shipboard journals of
American whalemen. Group discussions during this week will include “Reading
Objects as Historical Sources of the Mariner,” “Maritime Documents
and Using the Research Library”.
Week Three: The Maritime Community and the Maritime
Landscape
The maritime community in New England in the nineteenth century was multi-racial
and multi-lingual; immigrants worked aboard every type of vessel. On shore,
with men away at sea, women ran shops and farms, and provided essential support
for the maritime industries.
The French observer of American life, J. Hector St. John De Crevecoeur, said
that maritime “circumstances being often repeated, give women the abilities
as well as a taste for that kind of superintendency, to which, by their prudence
and good management, they seem to be in general very equal.” He went
on to ask, “What would the men do without the agency of these faithful
mates?”
It was not unusual for sailors recruited abroad, to make arrangements for
their wives and families to follow them to the United States upon the ship’s
return to the home port. After finishing a productive fishing career the schooner
Ernestina made voyages back and forth between New Bedford and the Cape Verde
Islands in that service, and descendents of whalemen and their families from
Atlantic islands continue to make up a significant part of the local population.
We will examine perceptions of how coastal areas began to change in Homer’s
era; our readings will include the New Bedford chapters of Moby-Dick, Sarah
Orne Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs and “The Gloucester
Mother,” and Robert Frost’s “Neither Out Far Nor In Deep,”
and Fred Calabretta’s “Fishing Out of Stonington.”
Our discussions will address the roles of women, families, and immigrants
in seafaring communities. We travel twice this week, first to Brown University
in Providence to examine cartography resources at the John Carter Brown Library;
then to visit Harvard University in Cambridge to look at the historic navigational
instrument collection in their Science Center.
Later we will go to the Fogg Museum of Art for close viewing and discussion
of Winslow Homer’s paintings: Schooner at Sunset (1880); Sunset at Gloucester
(1880); Sailboat and Fourth of July Fireworks (1880); and Gloucester Sunset
(1888), Our reading of Marc Simpson’s essay “Homer’s Wine
Dark Sea” provides us with a critical interpretation of these specific
artworks and will center our discussions of these artworks at the Fogg.
We end this week on campus to address problems of preserving America’s
maritime heritage, with guests from the curatorial and library staff of the
New Bedford Whaling Museum and the Kendall Research Institute.
Week Four: New Views and Lessons Learned starts
with our Monday trip to Portland, Maine where we will view Homer’s late sea paintings in the Portland Museum of Art.
Visiting Scholar Marc Simpson joins us in Portland, speaking informally about
curatorial issues, both ‘then & now.”
The next day we hear his lecture On Realism & the American psyche: Have
Homer’s Views influenced Ours? As we return to campus late afternoon,
we pass through Scarborough, ME where we will visit Prout’s Neck, the
Homer enclave in collaboration with special arrangements made for our Institute
by the Portland Art Museum.
Our final days in the Institute will be devoted to lesson refinement, presentations
of lesson and peer reflection on experiences and learning throughout Summer
Institute.
We will conclude the Institute with a social event and dinner for all, with
departures on Saturday, August 8, 2009.
Course Content
Among
the most persistent romantic notions in the American psyche are those
that start at the water’s edge. The American painter Winslow Homer represented
the maritime landscape around him at a time of profound change, but documented
only a very specific fraction of it. Homer lived in an age when the introduction
of steam technology was dramatically altering the nature of shipboard work,
American seafaring trades were expanding to every part of the globe, new immigrants
were crossing the Atlantic by the tens of thousands, and the perception of
seacoasts and waterfronts was beginning to change. What had once been seen
as dangerous places for the uninitiated--landscapes bearing the full brunt
of the force of nature, or the domains of working class sailors--were being
transformed into inspirational and recreational destinations. In Homer’s
paintings one can find evidence of the tradition of sail that had endured
for centuries, and subtle hints of the new age of technology, science, and
leisure that was rapidly sweeping it all away.
Our
Institute will run for four (4) weeks, starting on July 12 and ending
on August 8, 2009. During each week we will hold sessions from 9:00 am through
3:00, supplemented in the afternoons with time for informal meetings and discussions
with co-directors, consultants and Visiting Scholars. Weekends are free for
exploring the region, recreation, reading and socializing.
Sessions are planned to give everyone time to talk together informally about insights, progress and emerging issues. The Institute will take place on the University’s main campus and at its nearby urban facilities in New Bedford, which is America’s premier fishing port. The New Bedford campus includes the University’s fine arts building (called “Star Store”) as well as one of its major research facilities, SMAST, the School for Marine Science and Technology. The New Bedford Whaling Museum, where we will spend several days exploring their archives, is part of a national historic park and within walking distance of the downtown campus. We have planned five field trips in the Institute. Two of those trips will be to Boston and Cambridge where specific artworks will be made available to us for close reading and discussions in the Morse Reading Room of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and in the Alice Mongan Center at Harvard University’s Fogg Museum of Art. We have planned experiential workshops during some afternoons and evenings (e.g., Celestial Navigation under the stars; a 1938 film of Captain’s Courageous; a workshop on Winslow Homer’s technical skills) not only to enhance the Institute’s intellectual content but also to augment peer and social interaction.
Time has been also been set aside throughout the Institute for teachers to work together, engaged in cross-disciplinary curriculum design and development. During such times, our teachers, in small teams of five, will be led by Master Teacher Kessler. They will select a thematic maritime focus, generate essential questions germane to that topic, consider cross-disciplinary instructional methods and materials, and share interdisciplinary ideas and sources in preparation for their group’s presentation to peers. All peer teachers can thus recommend ways for peers to refine their emerging materials, suggest additional sources and share knowledge. Teachers’ final project presentations, with feedback from all including the Co-Directors and some of the project’s consultants. Our teachers’ lesson plans and materials will go ‘live’ on our website at the conclusion of the Institute, thereby expanding the range of new interdisciplinary materials that can be used in classrooms by pupils of all ages. Our Webmaster will post the final curricular materials and will also assist teachers in their acquisition of digital resources; technology assistance will be readily available to participants for both Mac and PC platforms.
