Origins: V 8 August 2015 Page 1 Table of Contents
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Origins: V 8 August 2015 Page 1 Table of Contents TACTILE TEACHING: New and Returning IBHA Members ......................................................... 12 Models for “Teaching Museums” Lanier Graham 2016 IBHA Conference Call for Papers .................................................... 13 CSUEB & New Tweets ...................................................................................................... 18 INSTITUTE FOR AESTHETIC DEVELOPMENT ............ 3 Crisis at the Edge of Science? ...................................................................... 19 Board Election Through July ...................................................................... 19 Turning 21 in the Post Conference Big History Tour ............................................................. 20 Anthropocene: Cover picture: Linus Pauling, world-famous chemist, lecturing with some of his Nate Hagens molecular models. Pauling’s legendary office was also a classroom-gallery of models for University of Wisconsin-Stephens Point, USA ................ 11 chemistry students. Pauling was the only Nobel laureate ever to receive one award as a scientist and one award as a humanist (The Peace Prize). Photo: Oregon State University Library. http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/retrieve/ResourceMetadata/MMBBNB Origins Editor: Lowell Gustafson, Villanova University, Pennsylvania (USA) Origins. ISSN 2377-7729 Thank you for Associate Editor: Cynthia Brown, Dominican University of California (USA) your membership Assistant Editor: Esther Quaedackers, University of Amsterdam (Netherlands) Please submit articles and other material to Origins, Editor, [email protected] in the IBHA. Your membership dues Editorial Board Mojgan Behmand, Dominican University of California, San Rafael (USA) The views and opinions expressed in Origins are not necessarily those of the IBHA Board. all go towards the Craig Benjamin, Grand Valley State University, Michigan (USA) Origins reserves the right to accept, reject or edit any material submitted for publication. adminsitration of David Christian, Macquarie University, Sydney (Australia) the association, Andrey Korotayev, Moscow State University (Russia) International Big History Association but do not by themselves cover Johnathan Markley, University of California, Fullerton (USA) Brooks College of Interdisciplinary Studies our costs. The only paid position is a part time Barry Rodrigue, Eurasian Center for Macrohistory, Russian Academy of Sciences, Grand Valley State University adminsitrative assistant. Other costs are for Moscow (Russia) 1 Campus Drive our website, for example. Please consider a tax Fred Spier, University of Amsterdam (Netherlands) Allendale MI 49401-9403 deductible (in the US) gift to our 501(C)3 and Joseph Voros, Swinburne University of Technology (Australia) http://ibhanet.org/ please consider remembering the IBHA in your Sun Yue, Capital Normal University, Beijing (China) 616-331-8035 will. TACTILE TEACHING: Lanier Graham Models for “Teaching Museums” at three San Francisco Bay Area Universities: [email protected] Dominican University of California, CSUEB & INSTITUTE FOR AESTHETIC DEVELOPMENT California State University, East Bay, & the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley ’ve been teaching world art, world religions, & museum studies for 50 years. Before I started to do that full time, I was a museum curator, starting at the WORLD RELIGIONS Museum of Modern Art in New York and then moving to San Francisco to DISPLAY (Taoism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Ibe Chief Curator of the Fine Arts Museums. I use the same kind of educational Buddhism). Modern World technology that most of you do (slides, digital presentations, internet courses). Classroom-Gallery, CSUEB However, I’m not using any of that today. Why? Because I want you to move your Library. Display space: 3’ x 7’ mind into pre-modern technology and think about how actual objects (stones, wide. bones, paintings, and sculpture) communicate more deeply than slides, books, and websites. Why? Because tactile objects engage all of our senses & not just that narrow part of our mind that visualizes abstractions. As a consultant, I also help foundations, universities, and government agencies MODERN WORLD CLASSROOM-GALLERY, Museum Studies Program, CSUEB Library. In develop master plans for museums and galleries. Some years ago, the President this unique laboratory, students have designed small displays of Big History highlights from the of Cal State University, East Bay, asked me if I would be willing to plan a teaching Renaissance to the Present, as they worked towards the design of a large Big History teaching museum in the Main Library on the Hayward campus. I said “yes,” on the museum. Artistic, literary, & scientific developments are represented side by side. The layout condition that it contain not only art history but also world history in a way that begins with a World Religions display, on an altar table, then moves into the corner to a full facsimile edition of THE GUTENBERG BIBLE. For this design team, Big History is a vision, a would serve all the academic departments - the humanities and the sciences. continuous inspiration, but not a dogma. The team felt free to make its own interpretation of key What should such a teaching museum look like? I had no idea, so I started relationships. Origins: V 8 August 2015 Page 3 Lanier Graham “Tactile Teaching” from scratch with input from the Art Department, Anthropology Department, History Department, etc. The students in my graduate seminar on Museum Studies built a scale model to begin to visualize possibilities. The space available was only about 3,000 square feet, but enough to tell the human story from the Stone Age to the present with PLAN for the MODERN WORLD touchable artifacts from all the great spiritual traditions. Digital tablets CLASSROOM-GALLERY would be available along the way, so that students could ask questions at After visual acknowledgement of the six great World any point during their visit. Religions that animate the Modern World, the chronological sequence of this tactile textbook begins with a replica of the GUTENBERG BIBLE, as well as other major 15th To move things along, I arranged for a collection of world art to be century books illustrated by Botticelli and Durer. Then comes Leonardo’s Corner. Here donated to Cal State from a charity called the Institute for Aesthetic one can catch a glimpse of the breath of his genius as an artist and as a scientist by the Development (IAD). That attracted a great deal of interest from the experience of framed art, scale humanities professors. models of his inventions, a full facsimile edition of the one book he How should we deal with the physical sciences? My inspiration illustrated, The Divine Proportion came from a book called Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present written by his teacher Pacioli, and by Cynthia Brown. That book made me realize that we needed a full a nearby Leonardo website ready Science Wing (to tell the story of the cosmos) in front of the Humanities for unlimited questions. The next section of this long wall is a 17th Wing (to tell the story of humanity.) century display which features prints What should the Science Wing look like? Not being a scientist, I by Rembrandt and Rubens hanging over an early telescope from the era asked the Dean of the College of Science at Cal State if I could organize of Kepler and Newton when the a conference to conceptualize a plan. I wanted to use the combined Scientific Revolution began. Then brainpower of the chairs of all his departments: Astronomy, Biology, come the 19th & 20th century walls, Chemistry, Geology, etc. That conference took place in the summer of with books illustrated by famous 2012, right after the first IBHA conference where Cynthia introduced artists such as Blake, Manet, Matisse, me as the planner of the first “Big History Teaching Museum.” Well - and Miro, and finally a Scientific Developments Corner. Here are not quite. Cal State was not ready for all of Big History, but the general working models of steam engines vision was stimulating for everyone at the science conference. of the type used at the start of the Industrial Revolution, followed by If the Science Wing were to follow the historical divisions of Big models of telegraphs, History, the divisions would have been based on the thresholds. But that telephones, computers, is not what the science faculty wanted to do. They wanted to tell the trains, planes, rockets, cosmic story in logical stages, but in stages that also are the study fields & the Hubble Telescope. of each academic discipline. Each area of the wing would mark not only All the models can be handled. Display space: each phase in the development of the universe, but would also explain 20’ x 30’. how each discipline studies that evidence. So the idea was to start off with astronomy/cosmology, then to follow with physics, chemistry, geology, and biology. In the minds of the science faculty, each division Origins: V 8 August 2015 Page 4 Lanier Graham “Tactile Teaching” PLAN for the proposed WORLD HISTORY LEARNING CENTER, University Library, CSU East Bay (Project 2010-13) The basic concept of the design was inspired by Big History. The Story of the Cosmos and The Story of Humanity are given equal importance. The design group was made up of graduate students in the Museum Studies program over a period of several years under the leadership of the Program Director. For this design team, Big History is a vision, a continuous