EMPLOYING MUSEUM OBJECTS IN UNDERGRADUATE LIBERAL ARTS EDUCATION By Dan Bartlett, Nicolette Meister, and William Green Beloit College's (Beloit, Wisconsin) Logan Museum of Anthropology operates in an intimate liberal-arts envi- ronment that emphasizes interdisciplinary teaching using innovative pedagogy. The College develops students' capacities to synthesize experience and evidence and to adapt and apply skills and knowledge to new contexts. In support of this emphasis, the Logan Museum encourages and assists the College community in making the maximum practical use of museum resources in teaching and learn- ing across campus, not just in anthropology (Meister and Green 2009). Founded with 3000 objects in 1894 as a teaching museum for the College, the Logan today is American Alliance of Museums accredited and curates 350,000 objects from 129 countries and more than 600 cultural groups. In the early 1900s, curator and associate professor Ira Buell began using the collections to "make our Museum a means of College culture." Buell assigned freshman in rhetoric classes an object from the collections to be the focus of a writing assignment. "We feel that we have in our College Museum a valuable asset," Buell wrote, "not only for the pursuit of the usual lines of scientific study but for the enrichment of purely cultural study" (Buell 1914). The mu- seum continues that tradition today by engaging new stu- dents through the First-Year Initiatives (FYI) seminars. An FYI seminar is a semester-long, themed course designed to integrate incoming students into an academic environment in general and Beloit College in particular. But why might freshman courses focused on the physics and biology of flight or the treatment of human disease want to make use of collections in an anthropology museum? And how? To facilitate collection use in a variety of classroom settings including FYI seminars, we employ object-based learning we call "Visual and Material Culture Pedagogy" (VMCP). We developed VMCP to assist faculty in thinking about how to use the museum's resources in their teaching. The pedagogy takes two approaches. The first is grounded in classic material culture study models and informed by inquiry-based gallery teaching methods. This approach focuses on the cultural aspects of objects and the view- points of various disciplinary lenses that can be employed to analyze those aspects. The second approach ignores the cultural context of the objects (at least at first) in favor of close observation and analysis that divorces objects from their original meanings or functions and uses them to sup- port some other, often unrelated, course goal. We refer to this approach as an anchor. Both approaches forge trans- formative emotional and cognitive connections driven by pedagogical objectives that privilege skill building in visual literacy, critical thinking, and collaborative learning. The focus of this article is on the second, anchor, approach. We review some of the literature supporting this approach and offer two case studies of courses that have applied it. For a full overview of Visual and Material Culture Pedagogy, see Bartlett (2012). The Value of Object-Based Pedagogy Objects can act upon the emotions of people who en- counter them. VMCP attempts to leverage that ability. Kiersten Latham has found that objects can bring other times, places, or ideas to life, or reveal the minds of their makers, and that this ability can have a significant impact on a person's understanding. Latham ascribes to objects what she calls the "object link," the unique ability to trigger profound thoughts and feelings within the viewer. This potential emotional impact should not be undervalued as a tool for successful teaching and learning in the classroom. Latham's research focused on historic artifacts, but that same object link can connect a 4000-year-old prehistoric copper spear point to a contemporary chemistry student and trigger perceptions and thoughts about the physical properties of elemental copper (Latham 2009).1 Objects are social. Nina Simon defines a social object as "one that connects the people who create, own, use, critique, or consume it." Objects play a role in enabling conversations by allowing people to talk "through" an object. Simon uses the example of her dog as a social object. When walking her dog, strangers approach and talk to her through her dog. "The dog allows for transference of attention from person-to-person to person-to-object-to- person. It's much less threatening to engage someone by approaching and interacting with her dog, which will inevi- tably lead to interaction with its owner" (Simon 2010:129). Objects provide the same facilitated communication in the classroom, leading to more productive discussions and greater class cohesion, especially in first and second-year classes in which students might not know or be comfort- able around all their peers. Objects make excellent foci for inquiry-based and active learning methods. The use of these techniques fosters in- 3 - ILR January/February 2014