The Graduate Student Teacher Program at the Harvard Art Museums: A Three-Way, Multi-Visit High School Partnership

The Graduate Student Teacher (GST) Program is a multi-visit high school partnership program between the Harvard Art Museums, Harvard graduate students, and Cambridge Rindge and Latin School (CRLS), the only public high school in Cambridge. Each year, the program trains a cohort of 10-12 graduate students ("GSTs") in fields such as Law, Education, and Art History in best practices for interdisciplinary object-based learning. The GSTs then partner with CRLS classroom teachers in a variety of disciplines to teach gallery visits for their high school students. CRLS students come to the museums approximately three times per semester and use artworks as primary sources, case studies, and springboards to discuss themes related to what they are studying in class. An English class might practice their writing skills with an artwork, a history class might talk about a work as a case study on migration, and a Spanish class might practice their vocabulary by describing objects and spaces. The program runs on collaboration, thoughtful learning design, and student-centered experiences.

Since its restart after the Harvard Art Museums' pandemic closure, the program has had a renewed focus in three areas: developing CRLS students' museum literacy, fostering their museum-going identity, and robust data collection to assess how the program impacts young people in our community. This presentation will discuss the current shape of the program, lessons we have learned over the past three years, and how two new initiatives--the 9th-grade program and the Spanish program--are changing the way we teach at the Harvard Art Museums.