This is an article written by Litza Juhasz who formed a museum/school partnership as a direct result of the museum education conference that The Fund co-sponsored in 1999 in Budapest.

Today, object based teaching and developing students’ perceptual skills stand at the forefront of museum education. The Friends of the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, working together with Museum staff, employ both of these fundamentals when planning programs for students in the Old Masters Gallery. In addition, since we began creating programs for class visits during the fall of 1999, we have worked closely with teachers to insure that areas of study at the Museum relate to current school topics, programs suit teachers’ needs and our approach speaks to students in a language they understand.

Erzsébet Dobcsányi Tatainé, an English teacher at Németh László Elementary School in Budapest, and I have been working together on a pilot program since we meet at the Museum Education conference in Budapest in the fall of 1999. We began by planning a series of lessons for her seventh grade students concerning who works at the Museum and what their jobs’ consist of. Then we looked closer at how a museum functions and the “life of a painting” by investigating the question, “How Does a Painting Get on the Gallery Wall?” Bernardo Bellotto’s The Kaunitz Palace and Gardens was chosen as the work to study, from its inception in Vienna in the 1760s to the time when museum staff hung it in the Old Masters Gallery. Finally, in honor of International Museum Day in May, Mrs. Tatai’s students learned how to play and make several art games from the Old Masters Gallery and the Egyptian Exhibit. At the Museum Days’ festival (held in the garden of the National Museum) some of the students volunteered to work together with adults in assisting the children visitors “restore” paintings, draw backgrounds and make hieroglyphic stamps. One student participant remarked, “On Saturday...I made a hieroglyphic eraser stamp for myself. I made an effort to practice the activity so that the next day I would be able to do it perfectly, when the children are there, counting on me to help them...I really enjoyed this work. When the time was up, I was a little surprised that the two hours had gone so fast. If I’m needed next year, I would gladly come.” We hope she and other students her age do!

At the beginning of the 2000-2001 school year, Mrs. Tatai and I anticipated that with the introduction her students had to the Old Masters Gallery last year, this school year, as eighth graders, they would be ready to look more closely at three genres in the Dutch and Flemish Collection. We chose still-life painting, portraits and stormy seascapes. In the fall, her students spent considerable time looking at still-lifes, comparing and contrasting them and making their own ones from objects they brought from home. During the spring semester, after the students have applied to high schools, Mrs. Tatai hopes to visit the Museum with her eighth grade class at least twice for activities which will support and encourage them to “read” the portraits and stormy seascapes they see and find meaning in them for themselves.

This pilot program has been successful from many standpoints. First a multi museum visit program has been established, encouraging year-long programming. Therefore, both Mrs. Tatai and her students have visited the Fine Arts Museum several times, becoming more acquainted with the objects on display, the Museum itself and its staff. Second, as a museum educator, I have continued to propose an interdisciplinary approach, suggesting for example, that students write up their essays in Hungarian class or use their computer lessons to view the Museum CD or type their final versions of their written work. Third, throughout all of the activities, we have been able to focus on the objects themselves and develop the students’ perceptual skills. This has aided them in “hearing” what masterpieces of art have to tell them. Finally, I have taken what we have learned from this pilot program and applied it to developing programs for other schools. This year we opened the program to Rogers Personal-Centered Elementary and High School. I hope that beginning September 2001 many more schools will join us in creating exciting, interactive programs for their students in the Old Masters Gallery.