Why I’m Not Using Slide IDs in my Introductory Art History Course
Making students memorize artworks is more than useless, it is an active hindrance to learning.
For decades the typical Art History university course has involved an exam of two sections: essays, and Slide IDs. Your essays might involve things like explaining a concept or period, doing a close analysis of an artwork, or comparing multiple artworks, among other prompts. A Slide ID is an artwork that the instructor expects the student to memorize information about, typically the title, artist, nationality or era, date, and materials.
As I completed my Art History Master’s degree I worked for two years as a Teaching Assistant for the introductory Art History survey course. Four different instructors taught those courses over my time in the program, and every single one required students to memorize information about a selection of artworks and then regurgitate that information on an exam. (Yes, even during online teaching in COVID times. Yes, students miraculously did better during those semesters than they ever had previously. I wonder why.)
This spring I will be an adjunct Art History professor for the first time, and I will not be requiring my students to memorize artworks for an exam.
I remember studying for Slide ID exams when I was taking my first Art History course during my Bachelors in 2013. I didn’t have a smartphone at the time and we had a limited printing budget, so I made my flashcards in Microsoft Powerpoint and flipped through them in the library. And I did this for hours.
I did well on the exams. It turns out that memorization is a skill that can be taught, when I had previously believed it was something you were born with. But after the end of the semester? The information started slipping way. Some of it stuck around, mostly the artworks that I constantly referred back to, and usually just the names and styles, and a general sense of the time period and country. The nitty-gritty details of specific dates slipped away. And any information about the artworks I wasn’t continuing to study? Buddy, that stuff was gone.
I went through a phase of trying to justify Art History Slide IDs, both to other people and to myself. I reasoned that what we were doing was building a repository of images to know, so that then we could compare any new image we saw to something we already know. Comparison is, after all, a key skill in Art History. If you already know about the Mona Lisa, then when you encounter another Renaissance portrait, you have something to compare it to, right?
The thing is that you don’t actually have to memorize a lot of information about specific artworks to do this. In fact, asking students to memorize a lot of data does not make them better at the comparison at all.
Slide IDs are a relic of an older time in Art History. This has two components: elitism, and the limits of technology.
Art is a tool of power and for hundreds of years societies have used art to define themselves and to distance themselves from one another. Specifically in Europe and the United States, the cultural elite would study Art History to understand “our heritage.” By studying a narrow, linear model of Art History where we follow “Western cultural thought” from ancient Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the nineteenth century and the twentieth (as if it were a straight, linear path, which it certainly is not), the idea was that we would better understand our place in the Western canon.
So for an Art History class to have Slide IDs, it essentially conveyed that “If you know these key European cultural monuments, you are a cultured person. You recognize your place in this progression of History.”
To do this, the professor has to narrow down the huge, diverse, messy, complicated world of Art History into just a few monuments for students to rote memorize.
That’s not what Art History is actually about. I work as an Art History researcher now, I’ve worked in auction houses, galleries, and museums. I’ve published my own academic articles. No one is expecting me to have all of these details about artworks memorized, so why would I ask this of my students?
Art History is about the development of visual literacy. Essentially, we recognize that an image (be it a sculpture, a painting, a building, etc.) can be read in the same way that a book can. You can read for meaning, of course, but also to understand how a book or an artwork works on you.
This brings us to tech. It’s true that back in the day you would not be able to look up an artwork to know anything about it. Remember when your math teachers in elementary school told you “you won’t always have a calculator with you!” and now we all have one in our phones? The same is true of Art History. A student can look up the date of a painting if it really matters that much, but deciphering the meaning of an artwork and understanding how it is put together is a lot harder to Google.
If you’ve ever sat in the back of an Art History course and watched students, as I did when I was a Teaching Assistant, you’ll notice a pattern. The students take notes when the professor says to, and for the traditional course that’s when the professor is telling them what is going to be on the exam. Otherwise? They’re not taking notes because they’re not learning, they’re just waiting for the next thing they’ll need to memorize. I also heard this during my office hours from students who aced the Slide IDs but bombed the essays because they were too busy memorizing to build the critical thinking skills they should be focusing on. They’re too busy preparing for an exam to learn.
This isn’t the fault of the students, it’s what a Slide ID demands of them.
Speaking with another member of my graduate cohort, we agreed that in this day and age Slide IDs are mostly two things: academic hazing, and a product of professors not knowing what else to do.
I want my students to focus on building the skills they’ll use for many different kinds of artworks, not just memorizing the data about a narrow, proscribed set of artworks.
What are we doing instead? That’ll be tomorrow’s post. Consider following me to keep up with my Art History adjuncting journey.
Hi, I’m Mary! I’m an art researcher who loves teaching about art. If you enjoyed this piece and want to hear more about art history and museums, consider giving me a follow. Thank you for your support!
