Lenia Kouneni

This chapter focuses on the process, challenges and benefits of using physical materials from museum collections of the University of St Andrews to teach eighteenth-century art and its engagement with archaeology and classical culture. The discussion will present the process of designing the module curriculum, the challenges it posed and the responses of the students; it will focus on the different ways museum objects were studied, displayed and utilised in order to enhance learning. This case study is a reflection on the practice of object-based learning (OBL) using museum and special collection objects to promote student engagement and understanding of concepts and ideas around classical reception. The discussion will also address the difficulties and possibilities of an object-based approach in the light of the recent COVID-19 pandemic, considering the use of digital objects through newly developed digital tools.

OBL is a pedagogy based on active or experiential learning using objects to facilitate deep thinking.¹ This student-centred, inquiry-based approach for ‘learning about, with and through objects’² is used increasingly by many academics across higher education (HE).³ University College London museums have been leading the field of enquiry into OBL and its particular benefits for university programmes and have developed projects focusing on exploring the ways in which museum collections can enhance learning for HE students.⁴ In OBL inquiry is focused on physical materials and sensory experience. Recent scholarly literature has endorsed the value of engaging with objects in making learning real; objects act as multi-sensory ‘thinking tools’ to inspire discussion and group work, promote lateral thinking, and ultimately deepen students’ learning.⁵ Objects motivate students to ask questions and to seek answers.⁶ Students are generally enthusiastic when presented with real works of art, manuscripts or scientific equipment. They get far more excited and involved in front of real objects than reading a textbook. Objects have the power to create a ‘wow’ factor, as Kirsten Hardie has argued; they ‘surprise, intrigue and absorb’ students, adding fun to learning.⁷ Research has also illustrated that ‘object-handling has a long-lasting effect and relationship with memory’.⁸ Haptic engagement with an object triggers emotion and aids memory retention.⁹ Students and audiences who engage with actual objects are able to recall knowledge about them and their associated stories better than their peers exposed to digital surrogates.¹⁰ Touching an object is ‘a startlingly intimate act and can do more to connect a student with the ancient world than watching a dozen documentaries or sitting through 100 lectures’.¹¹

This method forms the basis of my approach to teaching the eighteenth century and its reception of classical culture as part of an art history honours module entitled ‘Classicism in Western Art: The Legacy of Greece and Rome’. Running annually, this module considers definitions of the classical, appropriations of classical forms and ideals, as well as changing attitudes to the past and the discipline of classical reception. A large part of the module focuses on the eighteenth century and its broader engagement with archaeology and classical culture. Classes consist of weekly lectures and seminars; the seminars are arranged in small groups of seven to ten students and they provide the ideal setting to experiment with teaching directly from objects. I designed these sessions to complement more formal learning based on lectures in order to create an environment that fosters students’ inquisitiveness. These hands-on sessions are centred on specific objects from the museum collections of the University of St Andrews.

Since its foundation in the fifteenth century, the University of St Andrews has amassed collections for the purposes of teaching, research and display, as many British and European universities did.¹² From the second half of the seventeenth century, the university’s historic collections were on display in the colleges and shown to visitors as part of a standardised tour.¹³ The range of ethnographic, anthropological and natural history material entering the university expanded throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; this expansion relates to intellectual curiosity and to what Matthew Simpson refers to as the ‘related culture of British imperialism’.¹⁴ These diverse objects, collectively referred to as ‘the Curiosities’, were placed in the university library alongside literary tools for their interpretation, such as books on natural philosophy and manuscripts.¹⁵ Their display in such a context emphasised the university’s connections with patrons, staff and alumni, and its international links. In 1838, the university and the Literary and Philosophical Society of St Andrews jointly established the first formal museum in the United College buildings.¹⁶ Displays in the Upper Hall in United College showcased the collections of mainly natural historical specimens but also anthropological and archaeological objects (Figures 7.1–7.2). This transfer of the ‘Curiosities’ collections out of the library context marked an important stage in the history and meaning of the university collections. The modern, rationally ordered displays in United College demonstrate a shift from a culture of ‘Curiosities’ and wonder to one of scientific inquiry. As Helen Rawson has argued, this change is associated with wider cultural shifts related to the Enlightenment and its legacy, British expansionism during the Age of Empire, and the development of modern science.¹⁷

Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, there was increasing use of the university collection as a teaching resource for scientific subjects. This is not unique to St Andrews, of course; universities have been informally collecting since at least the mid-sixteenth century in order to support their teaching and research missions.¹⁸ During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, university departments accumulated extensive collections, particularly concerning the study of art, archaeology and geology.¹⁹ Many university collections were formed as an instrument to support teaching and were an integral part of student experience in the nineteenth century; they played an active part in explaining, describing and archiving nature and science.

In the early nineteenth century, following the decline of the Literary and Philosophical Society, the university assumed sole responsibility for the museum and its holdings, which in 1912 were transferred to the Bell Pettigrew Museum, funded by Elsie Bell Pettigrew in memory of her husband James Bell Pettigrew, Chandos Professor of Medicine (1875–1908).²⁰ The Bell Pettigrew functioned as a university and public museum until the 1950s, when it was reduced to only its zoological collections; it still is today a rare survivor of an Edwardian zoological teaching museum and deeply embedded in departmental teaching. Collecting for teaching and research purposes has continued throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the fields of zoology, geology, archaeology, art and ethnography, among others. However, during the twentieth century object teaching and use of collections fell from popularity, not only in St Andrews but also around the world. It was only during the late twentieth century that universities and faculties started to look again at their collections with renewed interest.²¹

In the 1990s, the Museum Collections Unit was established in St Andrews with responsibility for all the university’s artefact collections, from art, ethnography, archaeology and numismatics to the science collections, including anatomical, geological and zoological specimens. After a long developmental stage, a new museum, MUSA (Museum of the University of St Andrews), was opened to the public in 2008. Today, the university collections consist of about 115,000 objects from art, history, science and medicine, housed in three locations: the Bell Pettigrew Museum and the newly extended and refurbished Wardlaw Museum (the previous MUSA) and a dedicated collections centre. The university actively promotes these collections as ‘active, and available for research and teaching’.²² In addition to these, the university library’s special collections hold printed books, manuscripts, photographs and the university archive. As part of a wide consolidation and digitisation project in order to raise the profile and functionality of the collections, a large part of these objects is available online through a dedicated site.²³ Although the rich and diverse range of the collections offer opportunities for teaching and research, the majority of staff and students are not familiar with the nature or extent of the university collections. This is not unique to St Andrews; it has been recognised that one of the main barriers to wider use of OBL in HE is a general lack of awareness by staff and students in institutions of their special collections.²⁴

Having worked on the university collections for my research, I was aware of their potential and eager to explore them for use in the classroom. I thus redesigned ‘Classicism in Western Art: The Legacy of Greece and Rome’ to include seminars that would focus on object-based instruction. It has been a rewarding experience but one that also has had a few challenges. Locating material relevant to the eighteenth century and to the learning outcomes of each session was the first hurdle. As mentioned earlier, the online database does not include all the objects in the collections. It took considerable time to browse and talk to curators in order to come up with a list of objects I could use in my seminars. An institutional circumstance that proved beneficial for my module redesign was the integration of collection data across the university into a single online database, making it easier to locate material. More recently, a re-evaluation of internal governance structures led to the merging of libraries and museums, bringing them together into a new administrative institutional entity with common strategic planning approach and themes. This integration facilitates engagement with library and museum collections across the curriculum and offers more opportunities for contributions to teaching and learning across the university.

The logistical aspects of organising object-led seminars are also important to consider.²⁵ OBL is a collaborative endeavour requiring support and input from special collections librarians, curators and archivists. There were a number of decisions and preparations to make, from finding suitable rooms and deciding on table arrangements to confirming the availability of curatorial staff to source and transfer the objects. Specialist library and/or museum staff are present in these seminars and introduce students to safe ways to handle objects and historical documents. All seminar sessions take place in rooms where the students can spend time working in small groups of three or four, contemplating an object and sharing their thoughts, responses and ideas (Figure 7.3). Students generally felt that the layout of the room, with the desks set up in a U-shaped configuration, was effective, as they could move around to encounter the objects and their feedback noted ‘the fun of being physically active instead of stagnant at desks’. While reading a book or listening to a lecture is a passive way of learning, OBL facilitates a more active encounter with objects.

Moving around the room, students are responsible for leading the sessions. OBL is participatory in principle and a practice based on – but also supporting – inclusive pedagogy. This approach enables a degree of autonomy and agency on behalf of the students, but it also means that as a teacher I had to shift from content expert to facilitator and find effective ways to support students with their enquiries. As one of the students observed, this method ‘is more time consuming and less dense in its transmission of information than a standard lecture’. This comment speaks to what I consider to be two of the key challenges of OBL. Multi-sensory analysis encourages slow, semi-structured learning; students need appropriate space and time. How as teachers do we fight the prevalent ‘content tyranny’ that encourages us to push through as much as possible in a session? OBL is not about placing an item in front of students and ‘explaining’ it to them, nor is it about handing them documents that will do so. Instead, the intention is to strive to engage students’ senses and material literacy to draw out the complexities and long histories of objects.

Thus, before providing any information on specific objects, I ask students to talk with each other to attempt to define what it is they see when they look at the object in front of them. Our seminars start with a close looking exercise, examining, describing and sometimes even drawing the physical characteristics of the object, focusing on its materiality. Subsequently, students work together in groups to formulate questions around its use, meaning and interpretation, and they can search the internet for more information, if needed. This process of decoding an object helps students to develop transferable skills such as critical thinking, problem solving and communication.²⁶ Students recognise the benefits of this approach and their feedback described OBL as an exhilarating and refreshing way to learn that fosters collaboration and improves investigative and reasoning skills.

In order to demonstrate in a more concrete way how I use OBL within my practice and in the context of teaching eighteenth-century approaches to antiquity, I now provide two examples of specific seminar topics and objects. One of the object-based seminars focuses on the concept and experiences of the eighteenth-century Grand Tour. For this session, I brought together objects from the Special Collections and Museum Collections: a display case filled with eighteenth-century cameos collected by Grand Tourists and two travel journals. The case with intaglios is part of a group of six housed in the university collections without much information regarding their provenance (Figure 7.4).²⁷ The first comments and questions revolved around the physical properties of the wooden case, discussing its potential use. Students examined closely the plaster cameos, noticing their varying sizes and depicted themes and being particularly inquisitive about their modes of production. The discussion then moved to broader issues around eighteenth-century display practices, the relationship between producers and buyers, the reproduction of the material culture and imagery of antiquity for a contemporary audience, and the market for souvenirs.

Alongside these intaglios, students examined another type of ‘product’ of the Grand Tour: the travel diary. I brought to the classroom two travel journals that recorded the same journey: one written by James David Forbes, a geologist and principal of United Colleges, St Andrews, and one written by his sister, Jane Forbes. Their journals described the long continental journey they took between July 1826 and July 1827. Students had an opportunity to examine them, turn their pages and consider them in the context of travel writing. But they also became witnesses to the different approaches and experiences of Jane and James, which prompted a discussion on gender. Even within the restricted time of the seminar, students indicated that Jane’s journals present a feminine perspective compared to her brother’s diaries, descriptions and drawings. Having the two next to each other, students could look closely at both text and image, and compare the descriptions of a female traveller to that of a male one.

Another seminar takes the form of a case study and centres on a local antiquarian, Lieutenant General Robert Melville (1723–1809). In 1791, General Melville wrote a letter addressed ‘To the Rector, Principals and Professors of the University of the City of St Andrews’ offering a medallion portrait of himself by James Tassie for display in ‘a small space in your Public Library among the more valuable Donations there’.²⁸ Following a close reading of the letter, students considered Melville’s motivations and the way he presented them (including his writing tone), but they were also eager to know more about the display of portraits in the university library during the late eighteenth century. With the assistance of one of the university curators who was present during the seminar, students uncovered the history of the collection of ‘curiosities’ formed in the university library and its growing pantheon of images of eminent men.

Together with the letter, students examined the medallion portrait created by James Tassie, focusing initially on its style inspired by classical models and its material, Tassie’s invention of a new medium, the vitreous glass paste (Figure 7.5).²⁹ Discussion moved to broader issues around the rise of portraiture in the eighteenth century and patronage. As we delved deeper, students became interested in the life and career of the specific sitter and patron of this portrait. The Fife-born Robert Melville was an antiquarian, interested in the Roman period and a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, but he was also an army officer, colonial governor and inventor of two types of naval gun, the ‘carronade’ and ‘melvillade’.³⁰ Melville was governor of Guadeloupe and in 1760 governor to the Ceded Islands (Grenada, Dominica, St Vincent and Tobago); he owned estates, including two large plantations and enslaved people. Thus, the objects of this seminar directed students to consider the colonial context for archaeological collecting, art patronage and antiquarian interest in the late eighteenth century. At the same time, these objects are undisputed manifestations of the imperial and colonial contexts for the collections at St Andrews and the involvement of Scotland (and Fife) in the British imperial project. When Tassie’s medallion of Melville was displayed in the library, it was surrounded by weapons of war and a bust of George III, as visual evidence of the success of the Empire and its conquests.³¹

Melville’s letter and medallion gave students the opportunity to appreciate troublesome and entangled meanings, understand better complex and abstract concepts, such as imperialism and colonialism, and tackle legacies of enslavement and empire.³² OBL can be a significant tool in disrupting, transforming and even decolonising collections. Teaching with such objects also contributes to the University Museums’ Strategic Plan to address colonial histories and institutional legacies.³³ Part of this strategic objective is the project Re-Collecting Empire, which explores entanglements of cultures resulting from colonial encounters in the past, and how creative responses can add new dimensions to heritage objects through examining and re-telling their narratives.³⁴ The inclusion of objects linked to colonialism and empire in teaching not only raises student awareness of such issues but also furthers the university’s processes of decolonisation.

When working with any collection, it is imperative that we acknowledge the impact of imperialism and colonisation. Biographies of objects and their interactions with collections are deeply revealing of colonial culture. University collections in Scotland create a space of learning that offers the possibility for revealing the many legacies of empire and slavery present in Scotland’s heritage.³⁵ Placing these objects in front of students and allowing them to interrogate their materiality alongside their origins, meaning and histories is a useful approach in bringing new light to existing collections. Students realise the need to confront imperial legacies within the university collection and wider society. Within the context of growing calls to decolonise institutional spaces, OBL offers an example of how universities and museums can redeploy their cultural assets to support a more democratic, ethical and authentic representation of their collections, their purpose and their origins.³⁶

Teaching with university collections often aligns and supports broader university strategies. An interesting aspect that students raised in their feedback is the personal connections that they felt they formed with the history of the university. The University of St Andrews highly values student experience and satisfaction.³⁷ It is a small university that fosters a sense of community and belonging in its students. Bringing into the classroom objects that are part of the university’s heritage provides students with an opportunity to learn about institutional history and feel part of its long tradition. Beyond their didactic value, these objects and collections help form the identity of the university. They provide material evidence of institutional research and tangible proof ‘of the evolution in knowledge and teaching which was taking place in the university in the past and continues to this day’.³⁸ Collection objects are thus central to the creation of a distinctive institutional identity.³⁹

Although the University of St Andrews has two museums, the majority of the collections are stored in a collections centre and are currently under-utilised and isolated from student life. Incorporating them into teaching allows them to be released from cabinets and storerooms, to populate tables and student attention, and to play a more dynamic and central role in university experience. Teaching with these objects – investigating, questioning and re-writing their narratives – builds new value and purpose into university collections.

After I organised these hands-on, physical interactions with objects for my seminars and ran them for a year, in spring 2020 I was faced with a challenge that I had not anticipated. The new, pandemic-adjusted teaching structure removed many of the opportunities to engage physically with the collection. This sudden shift affected the planning, organisation and implementation of all teaching activities. Object-based seminars were not possible in the format I had designed, but I was eager to attempt to adapt them to fit the new restrictions and learning realities of the pandemic. The most obvious solution was to employ a digital image. As argued earlier in this chapter, there are clear pedagogical advantages in direct object handling that involves all the senses in comparison to learning through digital surrogates. However, it is also worth noting that there is a long history of mediating objects. The photograph of the nineteenth-century display of the university collections in United Colleges shows objects inside cases that create tangible boundaries between objects and viewers/users. Teaching with these objects was often mediated through glass. In the present climate, the screen replicates the boundaries of glass cases, while enabling a new kind of experience. Discussions of the materiality of digital media have raised interesting issues around the literal, physical and networked qualities of digital artefacts and systems.⁴⁰ Digital museum objects have traditionally been described as surrogates and thus as lesser than their physical counterparts; they are, though, objects with their ‘own materiality, aura and value’.⁴¹

Following the pandemic, museums have investigated how best to use online and digital collections in learning and engagement. The curatorial team of the University Museums was eager to explore digital technology as a means to enhance people’s experience of the collection remotely and as a way to support teaching and digital delivery. The Director of Libraries and Museums of the University of St Andrews, Katie Eagleton, together with members of the University Museums in Scotland (UMIS) group, initiated a joint research project entitled ‘Online teaching with digitised museum collections’, supported by funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.⁴² At the same time, the Museums team and digital technology experts worked together to explore software that would provide an engaging and interactive experience in using museums and special collections digitally. The result was Exhibit, a digital tool that enables anyone to create interactive presentations with digitised material from the university (and other) collections, including 3D models, manuscripts, rare books, artworks and photographs. It is easy to use and can be shared or embedded in PowerPoint, Moodle, Microsoft Teams, WordPress and web pages.

With the support of the curatorial team, students enrolled in the ‘Classicism in Western Art’ module engaged in digital OBL. They were given links to specific objects from the online catalogue and I employed Exhibit as a teaching tool. For instance, I created a digital storytelling of a Grand Tour journal written in 1822 by Thomas Moody and illustrated with watercolours by Joseph Axe Sleap (1808–59). Exhibit allowed me to annotate passages and zoom in on details of the text and image, drawing students’ attention to specific passages, images, techniques and details (Figure 7.6).⁴³ I also asked students to collaborate in small groups to research individual works and create their own exhibits for a selection of objects in the university collection. They all received training from the Library Application Services Manager on how to use Exhibit and support from the Collections curators. Students engaged with this exercise enthusiastically and reported that it increased their confidence in the use of digital tools to conduct visual analysis and tell stories about individual objects. They also emphasised that it made them feel more comfortable with navigating digital collections and archives and it enhanced their knowledge of the university collections. Moreover, Exhibit challenged them to be creative and write in a different way, prompting them to think about accessibility and communication. Students who participated in these digital object-based seminars engaged with individual objects in an experiential learning environment and acquired both subject-specific knowledge and transferable skills.

My experience during the last few years has shown that digital technologies are a good complement to learning with physical collections and serve as an important tool when access to the physical collection is restricted. Although engaging with physical objects is different to engaging with digital objects, both offer opportunities for learning. Aside from the context of the pandemic, digital images are an alternative to further challenges of OBL, including large class sizes, student-to-object ratio, suitability of classrooms, availability of curatorial staff and access to objects outside of class, to name just a few. Access to high-quality digital objects allows students to study them at their own pace and outside of class time. However, this experience also showed that digital collections and tools cannot replace the tangibility of the physical objects. There are some aspects and benefits of OBL that cannot be achieved through the use of digital images; students, for example, commented upon the value of being able to feel the weight of the object or its tactile details. On the other hand, digital images give students access to a larger number of objects and facilitate a different level of engagement with them; students can study them from home, they can use annotation tools and they can present their work in an engaging and accessible way.⁴⁴ Used in conjunction with physical encounters with the objects, digital objects extend the students’ experience of the collection. They cannot be touched, smelled or felt in the same way that physical objects can, but it has been argued that they possess some type of matter.⁴⁵

Now, more than ever, we need to think carefully and creatively about course design and delivery. We need to be able to continue to support, inform and enrich the learning of our students. OBL, either through direct engagement with objects, or working with digital images and tools, gives us an opportunity to create a more experiential, interactive experience. It encourages students to participate actively, take control of their learning, learn from one another and foster an academic community. The immersive nature of the OBL experience leads students to explore their own attitudes towards their learning. It also introduces them to the rich history of university collections and fosters future collection advocates.