This section of the blog is intended to help faculty, students, and others use the AKALA digital image collection for teaching and research.  There are three components:

• a personal introduction by art educator Dianne Drayse Alonso;
• visual and critical thinking strategies that can be used to analyze items in the collection; and
• a case study of Victor Ekpuk’s All Fingers.

The introduction is geared toward those who have little or no background in Nsukka and contemporary Nigerian art.  A brief history of the Nsukka School is provided, including uli and nsibidi visual scripts that are incorporated in contemporary art.

Two sets of visual analysis strategies are discussed:

• visual analysis tools created by art education professor Renee Sandell, author of Using Form + Theme + Context (FTC) for Rebalancing 21st-Century Art Education (National Art Education Association, 2009).  Sandell is professor and director of graduate art education programs at George Mason University.

• Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) developed by Harvard-trained cognitive psychologist Abigail Housen and Philip Yenawine, director of education at the Museum of Modern Art from 1983 to 1993 and author of several books.  Housen and Yenawine are co-founders of Visual Understanding in Education, a non-profit educational research organization that develops and studies ways of teaching visual literacy and of using art to teach thinking and communication skills.

The case study page provides an in-depth analysis of one work in particular, Victor Ekpuk’s All Fingers.

These materials were prepared by Dianne Drayse-Alonso, studio art teacher at the Ogdensburg Free Academy, Ogdensburg, NY.  Dianne has a master’s degree in fine arts and has worked for the Brush Art Gallery as an independent consultant, providing curriculum development materials and creative hands-on assignments related to rotating exhibitions.