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These online resources are designed to support common core standards in history, humanities, and ethnic studies. Based on Fowler exhibition materials and publications, these materials enhance student engagement in the classroom by provoking inquiry into the intersections of art, history, religion, and current events.
Curriculum Resources: Fire Kinship
Prior to the colonization of Southern California in the 18th century, Native communities throughout the region used controlled fire practices to ensure the vitality of their local ecosystems. Fire-based land management practices ranged from small burns to spur healthy plant growth, to larger ones that strategically eradicated invasive species and reduced fuel loads (preventing catastrophic fires). Fire Kinship counters the attitudes of fear and illegality around fire, arguing for a return to Native practices, in which fire is regarded as a vital aspect of land stewardship, community wellbeing, and tribal sovereignty.
Curriculum Resources: Intersections: World Arts, Local Lives
This curriculum resource unit is conceived as a paradigm for approaching world arts and cultures in K-12 classrooms. In keeping with the conceptual framework of Intersections, this study presents a curricular approach based on how art works for individuals rather than one based on geography or historical chronology.
Thematic units follow the interpretive framework of the exhibition, therefore, and are presented within the rubric of Art and Action, Art and Knowledge, Art and Power, and Art and Transformation. Each unit begins with a Unit Overview and teachers are advised to begin their respective unit or lesson with this more general introduction.
Lessons encourage active learning, analytical thinking, cross-disciplinary and crosscultural comparisons, and visual and cultural literacy. The teaching suggestions introduce these methodologies, and lessons explore selected individual objects with broader humanities comparisons.
