ACADEMIC ENGAGEMENT 2016-2017 GRANTS FOR CURRICULAR INTEGRATION SCMA’S CURRICULAR INTEGRATION PROGRAM supports Smith faculty in designing new courses or modifying existing ones to incorporate a substantial new component of museum-based learning. Grants support museum engagement by integrating SCMA’s art collection more deeply into teaching; integrating museum methods and practice into teaching; and developing new or revised course components that engage students in broad consideration of collecting institutions and their role in society. Alex Dika Seggerman, Five College Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow, Art Department Art History 280: Luster and Gilt: Persian Painting at the Smith Museum Students in this course focused on Persian ceramics and paintings. They critically considered the Islamic art discipline, developed an in-depth knowledge of Persian art and curated a public installation at SCMA. The opportunity to teach Luster and Gilt at the museum this spring was a highlight of my art historical career. In this course, students worked with the Elinor Lander Horwitz ‘50 Collection of Islamic Art, including medieval Iranian ceramics and early modern Iranian and Indian book paintings. At the course’s conclusion, the students curated the first installation of these objects, About Face: People, Animals, and Mythical Beings in Islamic Art. The students also prepared a digital exhibi- tion website, so when the installation ends [in December 2017], their work will remain publicly accessible. The Museum Grant for Curricular Integration provided the support necessary to adequately craft the space and resources for students to accomplish the installation preparation—from developing the installation’s theme to debating Oxford commas—on their own. Rather than passively listening to lectures, these students physically worked with art objects one-on-one, presented independent research verbally and textually and dealt with the mundane details of checklists and wall label formatting. Learning about Islamic art in these diverse and active ways will surely have a lasting impact on all of them. Jordan Crouser, Assistant Professor of Computer Science Statistical and Data Sciences 136: Communicating with Data In this course, students learned the foundations of informa- tion visualization and sharpened their skills in communicating using data. Throughout the semester, they explored concepts in decision-making, human perception, color theory and storytelling as they apply to data-driven communication. I was able to spend six weeks collaborating with the staff at the museum to develop a curriculum that would not only scale, but would explore the connections between art and data science at a much deeper level. We planned four separate and comple- mentary activities at the museum: “Critical Looking: Deconstructing Visual Images,” drawing parallels to reading data graphics; “Curating a Collection of Visual Media,” exploring how curatorial choices reinforce or challenge systems of oppression, much like sampling bias in data science; “The Guerrilla Girls: Artists Mining Data,” looking at data as a medium for creative expres- sion, storytelling and activism; and “Text/Image: Mining Museum Labels,” reflecting on the museum as a cultural artifact and producing a curated dataset of information about the collection. 22 ACADEMIC ENGAGEMENT/2016 –2017 GRANTS