Questionnaire on Syllabi, 2023–2024Various Participants

In October 2022, more than twenty international scholars gathered for the two-day workshop ‘Worlding Art History through Syllabi’, organized by the Worlding Public Cultures project in collaboration with the ICI Berlin Institute Beginning of page[p. 124] for Cultural Inquiry.11Worlding Art History through Syllabi, workshop, ICI Berlin, 10–11 October 2022 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e221010>. Discussions focused on the role of syllabi in teaching, and how syllabus-design is shaped by departmental, institutional and national agendas, as well as language barriers, and collaborative teaching practices across universities and museums. Developed with eight of the participants after the workshop, this questionnaire extends these conversations by examining what a syllabus is, and how it might be designed and critically rethought to reflect nuanced and context-specific approaches to global art history.

The syllabus is not a universal tool in post-secondary education. Indeed, it takes different forms and has different roles in every educational setting. In your own words, what is a syllabus? How does it function in your regional and institutional context?

Varda Nisar (VN): My attempt to answer this question requires a brief detour via my first teaching experience at a secondary school in Pakistan. I realize now that we never shared a syllabus with the students; they were given a list of books, but no pedagogical intention, class objective, learning goals, or method was ever discussed or shared with parents. As such, the syllabus was a bureaucratic necessity submitted to the administration yearly before the start of the academic year that worked as a tool to monitor the Beginning of page[p. 125] educator’s progress through the course material. In other words, it was about ensuring that teachers were doing their jobs, not that students were developing intellectual skills.

My experience as an undergraduate architecture student in Karachi, Pakistan, was not much different. While a ‘brief’ was given in our studio class, there was no focus on what skills, methods, or learning would occur. I had little to no understanding of what I was working towards, what skills I was supposed to develop in any particular class, or what in fact was its purpose, except for the fact that successful completion of the programme would result in a pass grade, and eventually a degree.

As a PhD student, my introduction to syllabi in Canada was a cultural shock. As a fifth-year PhD candidate, I encountered diverse syllabi ranging from five to thirty pages. More recently, having worked on developing a syllabus for my first teaching assignment as a lecturer, I can appreciate the transparency that it brings. I hesitate to describe it as a rigid and uncompromising contract; rather, I choose to understand it as an invitation for dialogue and un-learning.

Anton Lee (AL): A syllabus to me is a roadmap for a journey during which a community of learning and care will be built around shared intellectual interests. The syllabus needs to be clear and thorough in its communication by outlining the roles, expectations, and responsibilities of all parties involved; it serves as a signpost that reminds teachers and students of their whereabouts and common objectives.Beginning of page[p. 126]

Most post-secondary institutions in North America treat the syllabus as a contract between the instructor and the students, a notion blatantly modelled on the business-customer relationship in the service industry. Despite the positive changes that this approach has brought about for accountability and quality control in higher education, a great conundrum lies in how to gauge the success of both teaching and learning, especially in the humanities and the arts. There have been tremendous efforts to mitigate this problem, including diversifying course formats, developing collaborative teaching, implementing alternative forms of assessments, and reducing class sizes.

For this reason, my teaching has greatly benefitted from being at an experimental art and design university, where class sizes are kept small and experimental course design is encouraged. This has also allowed my ongoing research to be organically funnelled into teaching and vice versa, making every syllabus a living document subjected to constant undoing and rebuilding.

One of my main motives for pedagogical innovation has been how we define criticality in the humanities and art education at this moment. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, my priority in teaching has shifted from emphasizing rigour in analysis and judgement, to organizing a community of learners through a reparative and restorative mindset. This has brought a fundamental change to the structure of my syllabi as well, with increased attention to the appreciation of being there for each other.Beginning of page[p. 127]

Song Xiaoxia (SX): I would say that a syllabus is an array of stars in the night sky. It is not some kind of timeline — from the past, through to the present, and on to the future. Rather, it contains multiple futures, many pasts, and a plethora of presents which all exist simultaneously, and move in many directions at once. I usually encourage my students to imagine what exists in the empty spaces between the array of stars. Which stars have been forgotten or ignored by our existing historical narrative?

Franziska Koch (FK): In the German public university sector, I would most directly translate the word ‘syllabus’ as a ‘seminar description and structure’ (Seminarbeschreibung und –aufbau). It usually consists of a brief abstract with a thematically focused summary, a preliminary, selected reading list (three to ten titles), and what percentage of the grade/credit points is available from each of the assessment methods (oral presentation, written paper, etc.). There is neither a consensus, a uniform practice, nor an institutional requirement for a more comprehensive format that would include comments on mandatory reading, explicitly formulated learning objectives and methods, or a comprehensive bibliography of teaching materials and details about each class session. During my time as a student at a university and an art academy between the 1990s and early 2000s, and as a university lecturer in the field of Art History and Transcultural Studies at two different universities since 2006, I have learned that this lack of structure is often attributed to the greater good of ‘freedom of teaching’.Beginning of page[p. 128] Students usually only learn these details in the first three sessions, or it is expected that this information is further developed dynamically during the course. The ‘art’, in this setting, is for students to find out in the first few weeks of the term which teachers adopt what kind of teaching style, and what suits them best.

Esra Yıldız (EY): The syllabus is like the identity card of a course and is the first step/connection between the course, the student, and the instructor; it provides information to students about the content of a course, introduces the course and the students’ responsibilities and expectations, and summarizes the course instructor’s perspective. The syllabus is shaped by the university’s (and department’s) educational policies and the local and global political and cultural atmosphere. The university where I work was a part of WASC Senior College and University Commission (WSCUC) accreditation, so a global educational perspective shapes the education system. The institutional, departmental, and national educational policies are all crucial in shaping a course’s content. On the other hand, the lack of teaching staff might also affect this. Part-time staff members sometimes change course syllabi without having enough information about the course programme and other courses.Beginning of page[p. 129]

How do you reflect your methodological approaches through syllabi?

VN: My methodological approach has always been included in the ‘Teaching Philosophy and Approach to the Class’Beginning of page[p. 130] section of my syllabi. My philosophy is rooted in my physical and sociocultural position as a (relatively) recently arrived ethnic minority immigrant who has yet to ‘assimilate’ within the linguistic and cultural milieu of Quebec and understand the history and challenges that arise from the settler-colonial history of Canada. As such, I never position myself as an expert, being comfortable describing my role in the classroom as that of a facilitator.

Facilitator (n) /fəˈsɪləˌteɪt̮ər/

‘a person who helps someone do something more easily by discussing problems, giving advice, etc. rather than telling them what to do’.

— Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries

As a facilitator, I try to do the work of making connections between different temporalities and geographies, whose lack of expertise is masked by engaging in questioning and a ‘co-intentional’ dialogue, as suggested by Paulo Freire. I am deeply indebted to maya rae oppenheimer for introducing me to the critical need to position ourselves constantly. Only after the intentional act of positioning has taken place, resulting in the recognition of our (lack of) privileges, can we do the work of un- and re-learning.

Tanya Talwar (TT): My studies in art history started in a packed lecture hall for students of the MA in Transcultural Studies at Heidelberg University, Germany. Until my PhD began, I was only ever on the receiving end of teaching practices. Fortunately, I had the opportunity to take on a Beginning of page[p. 131] teaching role in the summer semester of 2023 during my PhD at the Institut für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. I started with the basics. The idea behind the seminar was to dedicate each session to a term or concept that makes art historians raise their eyebrows for its ubiquity in art historical discourse on South Asia. Terms such as ‘Orient’, ‘native’, ‘imitation’, ‘Indianness’, and ‘modernity’ were used. The idea was to approach these terms critically through theoretical and analytical readings. We also looked at works of art from different regional contexts of South Asia that helped to unpack the term or concept under discussion.

The course became a process of moving away from or questioning an art historical ‘canon’, which is not always a Eurocentric phenomenon. Thus, the terms and concepts helped identify hierarchies of meanings, political processes, and multiple relationalities that inform art-making and aesthetic evaluations in the colony and its Post(s). As a follow-up to this course, I offered a seminar focusing on the regimes that shaped artistic modernity in South Asia. The seminar examined the entanglements of institutional frameworks with artmaking initiated during the colonial regime in South Asia, exploring how these shaped the transregional and transcultural production, reception, and circulation of art. Students engaged critically with artworks from collections held across institutions and geographies, alongside texts, to understand the complex dynamics that shaped historical contexts in which art and artists operated.Beginning of page[p. 132]

AL: My teaching has been influenced by Michel Foucault, especially his theorization of the symbiotic relationship between power and knowledge production. The most important implication to me is that scientific discourse is not immune to political issues, and it is rather preconditioned and maintained by them. One of the main objectives of my teaching is to denaturalize the air of universality and objectivity surrounding prevailing ideas and official narratives. This is to practise the history of the present, which is to study the past in order to imagine different possibilities for ourselves.

My syllabi often juxtapose widely accepted views with newer and provocative discoveries. Students are repeatedly reminded of the significance of these pairings, so that they can be more intentional as a participant in the paradigm shift unfolding. Similar efforts are made in peer discussions and debates and continue into written assignments by introducing readings and artworks stemming from marginalized subject positions. My seminar classes convey a sense of urgency in weekly themes and required readings, chosen for their relevance to current socio-political issues worldwide. These themes include the environmental crisis, the Anthropocene, petrocapitalism, decolonization, post-truth, racialization, queer/trans/non-binary, borders, migration, citizenship, and diaspora.

Critical pedagogy may be easier to develop in small and advanced seminars, rather than the large lecture settings where hundreds of students from various disciplines are enrolled and which are primarily managed by teaching assistants.Beginning of page[p. 133] Nevertheless, given the importance of these liberal arts classes to students across the campus, instructors must try to refuse the obsolete paradigm of art history orientated toward European and Anglo-American contexts.

What teaching strategies do you use? (E.g. connecting theoretical readings and visual materials, close observation at artworks, participation research, performance reconstructions, site-visits and collaborations with museums, research-based teaching, studio practice, etc.)

EY: For my (contemporary art and cinema) courses, I often use visual material, images of artworks, and stills from films to connect theoretical readings to art and cinema history. We do a close reading of artworks together with the students. I also organize visits to museums, art galleries, and cultural institutions. I invite experts, academics, and artists to share their experiences and bring a different perspective to the class.

AL: As an art historian, I encourage students to practise visual and material analysis. I constantly ask students to describe what they see, either in classrooms or at museums and archives. This process of close observation helps them make sense of the work’s material construction in visual terms. Then I incorporate their answers into a more sophisticated art historical argument to give them a sense of validation, while challenging them to push their ideas further. Consequently, students are more engaged with Beginning of page[p. 134] subject matter and ultimately take the initiative in deeper research.

For theory-orientated classes, I relish organizing collaborative teaching by inviting my colleagues as guest speakers. The guest will introduce the theoretical ground for their research and present on a specific case study that best showcases the practical use of their method. This is not only a great way of showing theories in use, but it also helps promote interdisciplinary culture among faculty. I have been collaborating more and more with studio arts faculty in teaching. This has been amazingly eye-opening to teach alongside artists, who have different ways of thinking, reading, and expressing ideas.

For advanced seminars, I have increased freedom to test out experimental teaching and assessment strategies. I might hold the meeting at municipal archives to talk about, for example, the relationship between vernacular photography and diaspora. I could also flip the position of the teacher and the students, so that the students lead the class. The students deliver oral presentations, the format of which is completely open to creative reimagination, including poetry reading, performance, scavenger hunt, and field trip, among others. When my courses have mostly students majoring in studio arts and design, I always provide a research-creation option for their final project, so that they will learn to integrate critical thinking into material production.

Miriam Oesterreich (MO): I usually aim not to have my syllabus fully fixed before a course begins. On the basis Beginning of page[p. 135] of first readings and some preview examples of what the topic may or may not encompass, I normally discuss and work out the final syllabus together with students. This allows me to consider their interests in and ideas about artistic positions and artistic phenomena (such as activist/protest positions, specific theoretical approaches, and so on), as well as to incorporate theoretical texts and exhibitions or site visits. Nevertheless, there are some texts and topics that I regard as essential and always cover. Sometimes students are not interested in historical topics and ask to leave them out. However, I regard reflection on the historicity of contemporaneous arts crucial to a critical and knowledgeable approach.

I ask students to become ‘experts’ on a specific class topic, to present on this, as well as to become a conversation partner during the whole course and to lead the discussion preparing their own questions or further material. I also practise the strategy of peer-to-peer-teaching, asking students to work on a specific text or piece of material, and then to present it to their peers and discuss it. I do something similar with in-class readings and discussions, where I ask students to form small groups and jointly develop presentations in the larger classroom.

Very importantly, I always try to do site visits and excursions and to invite expert guests for conversations (sometimes on sites). In my experience it is essential to back art theory with a discussion based on artworks/artistic positions in order to make it less abstract.Beginning of page[p. 136]

Laurens Dhaenens (LD): My teaching is grounded in research and collaborative endeavours with institutions and external partners. Collaborative initiatives can take various forms, such as hosting guest speakers who bring their expertise to the classroom. For instance, last year’s focus was on feminist art history and its representation in exhibitions and museums. In the coming academic years, I plan to engage in a close collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent, contributing to the exhibition project on Queer Art History in the Low Countries that they are planning. Students enrolled in the course ‘Kunstgeschiedenis 1900–1965’ will have the opportunity to participate in an on-site workshop led by one of the curators and contribute to the research through assigned projects. Furthermore, students are required to visit at least one modern art exhibition. Two years ago, we worked around the exhibition Belgium-Argentina: Transatlantic Modernisms 1910–1958 which I co-curated.

As part of the course ‘Introduction to Curating and Curatorial Studies’ I am working with several institutions, including the Museum of Art and History in Brussels. The emphasis is on the development of an exhibition concept for an object that is in the collection but is rarely or never shown. Curators from various departments are tasked with identifying objects that pose a curatorial challenge. The focus is on dormant heritage, with a thematic exploration centred around the peculiar, unusual, and curious. By working on these objects, we open a debate about exhibition practices and the role of cultural institutions,Beginning of page[p. 137] as well as what art history is and how it is represented. The museum has a vast and hybrid collection of art from around the world, ranging from pre-Columbian sculptures to medieval tapestries, Japanese prints, and monumental nineteenth-century painting. The results of this assignment Beginning of page[p. 138] often flow back into my survey course. In this sense, both courses — taken by diverse groups of students — are communicating vessels; what is taught in one course resonates in the other.

FK: Basically, strategic overload: in addition to introductory texts, I also have students read theory-heavy, complex argumentative texts, and texts discussing case studies. The students receive questions on these texts, which they answer each week in 500-word responses. The readings are often well above the level of BA or MA students and complement the historical facts, socio-political contextual information, and usually simple descriptions of works and artistic practices or concepts that the students have independently researched and presented on. We then try to arrive at a deeper understanding through discussion of readings and presentations. In the seminar room and during integrated museum visits, I systematically use the intensive observation of individual works in order to sharpen our vision and make our perceptions more relevant to the discussion and vice-versa. I draw students’ attention to institutional, economic, and socio-political aspects of the art world in order to also familiarize them with potential future professional fields. Students are encouraged to suggest their own presentation topics, while mine serve as a back-up list.

SX: Team projects and research-based teaching, site-visits, collaborations with museums, and critical thinking training.Beginning of page[p. 139]

Why are you interested in global art history? What is your understanding of ‘global’?

TT: The term ‘global’ becomes a useful lens when looking at local artistic practices, networks, and epistemologies. Their connections to other such localities and how these can transform and reinscribe each other are of interest to me. However, I consider being able to partake in this globality — in my case, through the transregional — as a specific condition and not a norm.

MO: In the words of Walter Mignolo, modernity has a ‘darker side’, which is colonialism. Here, he refers to a dualism of artistic production and theory, on the one hand, and the hierarchized, normalized, and globally entangled situations and discourses they are positioned in on the other hand. I think it is important to think of these together. Approached in this way, transcultural entanglements, both historically and for more contemporary practices, become clearer, while deconstruction of the mentioned contexts might help to make art history more equal: to ask basic questions, such as, what is art beyond its normalized nineteenth-century definitions? Who does art? Where is which art shown, under which conditions, and who is the audience?

I approach ‘global art history’ from the perspective of what Monica Juneja calls ‘critical globality’. For Juneja, it is important to consider the imperialistic implications that the term itself evokes. I similarly try to be open to entangled and transversal object histories, histories of historiography Beginning of page[p. 140] and histories of art historical thought. ‘Worlding art history’ is a term I use more for the method of doing art history from a worlded perspective as an ongoing and dialectical process. I consider migration in art (artists, art historians, objects and artworks, concepts) as acts of transculturation that create ‘contact zones’ (M. L. Pratt) which are always already hybrid though hierarchical.

EY: Global art history helps me to think about art history outside of dominant Western discourses. It also involves thinking about how the art history of my country is seen from different cultural perspectives. Thinking about what is global also means that those who come from outside the West shake up Western canons with new perspectives.

Because I was educated in Western art history (and the origin of modern Turkish art was influenced by Western art), I have always wanted to discover and learn about what lies beyond it. I come from a migrant family. My roots are also influential in my intercultural and multicultural teaching. My academic background, multidisciplinary education, and films — which also include subjects in a global context, such as being an exile and stateless — help me to think globally.

My international students from different parts of the world, such as Europe, Africa, and Asia, have also helped me very much over the years to develop my interest in global art history and rethink my teaching methodology. Because each of them brings their own cultural perspectives to class, I also revise the syllabus according to their Beginning of page[p. 141] cultural background and needs and try to ‘construct’ a cultural bridge between local and international students.

LD: My interest in global art history stems from a personal connection to South America, including my doctoral study on the development of art criticism in Argentina at the end of the nineteenth century. Confronting art histories in Latin America, primarily in Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and Peru, revealed how biased the art history I learned during my education was and how skewed the representation of art history still is in Belgian/ European museums and academies. Furthermore, the demand from students for a global perspective resonates more strongly each year.

FK: In the German-speaking context, the attribute ‘global’ in the field of institutionalized art history works to critically question longstanding nationally defined boundaries. In conjunction with the transcultural perspective that I use, this form of ‘global art history’ is not primarily about adding regions, practices, artists, or works to what has been taught so far, but rather simultaneously questioning and working on the epistemological conditions and boundaries of the subject and its interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary development. During the ‘Worlding Public Cultures: The Arts and Social Innovation’ project’s predominantly transatlantic dialogue, it became very clear to me how even in ‘Western’ or ‘Euramerican’ academia — art studies as conducted in and from the ‘Global North’ — the institutional frameworks are so differently conditioned and structured Beginning of page[p. 142] despite modern entanglements that we have to start from critical, self-situating ‘worlding’ (welten) if we want to agree on what a ‘transcultural perspective’ might mean.

AL: A junior faculty member in North America is expected to take on one of the large introductory surveys that sweep through more than half a millennium in one semester. These types of surveys have been the molds of art history as a world, demarcating and advocating the discipline’s value in higher education.

When it became my turn to take on such a course, I was determined not to repeat the traditional system of art history rooted in the study of Western art and culture. I opened the class with a criticism of the discipline by drawing from recent research on art history surveys, culminating in Yale University’s 2020 decision to scrap them. This set the tone for the rest of the semester by inviting students to the driver’s seat in a critical overhaul of art history as a world.

That year, I was lucky to find a recently published multi-authored textbook — The History of Art: A Global View by Jean Robertson and others — which served as a ready-made guide for class preparation. This speaks to the pragmatic dimension of practising global art history. Even as a novice learner of the cultural histories of Africa, Oceania, South America, West and Central Asia, I realize how much work needs to be done to catch up on the recent scholarship on those regions. That year, my students and I experienced the world as we know it being taken Beginning of page[p. 143] apart. When this sort of experience occurs, we leave the lecture hall with fresh eyes, armed with a critical insight into the world of art and history. This is, I believe, a small yet meaningful contribution to the worlding of art history.Beginning of page[p. 144]

Please provide two to three titles of courses you have taught in global/transnational/transcultural/‘worlded’ art history. Please specify at what level it was taught (undergraduate or graduate), giving examples at multiple levels if possible.

Tanya Talwar:

• ‘Terms and Conditions Apply: Unpacking Art Historical Shifts from a South Asian Perspective’ (BA seminar offered at the Institut für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Summer Semester 2023)
• ‘Regimes of Visibility and Artistic Modernism(s) in South Asia’ (BA seminar at the Institut für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Winter Semester 2024–25)

Anton Lee:

• ‘Art History II: 15th Century to the Present’ (introductory survey for 1st-year undergraduate students)
• ‘Global History of Photography’ (survey of the Field for 3rd-year undergraduate and MA graduate students)
• ‘Studies in the Humanities: Korean Art since 1945 — Modernism in the Postcolony’ (advanced seminar for 3rd- and 4th-year undergraduate students)

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Miriam Oesterreich:

• ‘Verflechtungsgeschichten in der visuellen Kultur/Entangled Histories in Visual Culture’ (postgraduate MA-level course)
• ‘Aisthesis Decolonial — Decolonial Theory in Art and Design’ (undergraduate BA- and postgraduate MA-level course)
• ‘Borders and Border Regions in Contemporary Art Production and Art Theory’ (postgraduate MA-level course)

Laurens Dhaenens:

• ‘Art History 1900–1965’ (1BA)
• ‘Introduction to Curating and Curatorial Studies’ (MA)

Esra Yıldız:

• ‘Contemporary Art, Theory, and Practice’ (BA)
• ‘Key Concepts and Debates in Contemporary Art’ (MA)
• ‘Art Worlds: Actors, Institutions, and the Network’ (BA)

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Franziska Koch:

• ‘International, Global or Transcultural? Critical Perspectives on Modern and Contemporary Collections in the [German Rhineland] Region’ (BA and MA students)
• ‘Chinese Art after 1949 — Production and Reception in a Transcultural Perspective’ (BA and MA students)
• ‘Why the “Global” Matters in Art History. Introductory Reading Course: Transcultural Perspectives on Visual Media and Material Culture’ (for 1st term students of the MA in Transcultural Studies)

Song Xiaoxia:

• ‘Study of Contemporary Art from a Global Perspective’ (postgraduate)
• ‘Special Study of Contemporary Chinese Art History’ (undergraduate)

Varda Nisar:

• ‘Art & Its Changing Contexts: Museums & Social Justice’ (undergraduate)
• ‘Gender Issues in Art and Art History: The Personal and the Political in Artistic Practices of Womxn (undergraduate)