Epstein, Terrie L. “The Arts of History: An Analysis of Secondary School Students’ Interpretations of the Arts in Historical Contexts.” Journal of Curriculum and Supervision 9.2 (1994): 174-194.

The Arts of History:
An Analysis of Secondary School Students’ Interpretations
of the Arts in Historical Contexts

Based on her own classroom experiences, Terrie Epstein describes how she enacted an arts-based curriculum and the students’ response to this approach. Epstein believes art is a “natural fit” for history and makes it more “human”. Art allows a variety of forms to represent historical knowledge and also to be utilized in constructing historical understanding, thereby offering students an alternative way to learn history. Epstein presents art as an intellectual process and provides detailed analysis based on first hand experience. She writes, “Groups of students who interpret a historical painting or poem see or read into it multiple meanings, in part by approaching it from different perspectives and considering its multiple purposes, themes, and tones, and in part by building upon classmates’ insights” (176).

Epstein provides a detailed description and analysis of her lesson on slavery using oral histories of slaves and African American spirituals, and writes, “ When using the historical arts to answer questions about a people’s historical experience, students’ interpretations or conceptions are characterized less by explanations and argument and more by insight into human experience and a kind of human quality or lifelikeness” (178).

Epstein concedes she allows a rather “wide net” when determining plausibility and concludes her report by writing, “In synthesizing interpretations of the historical arts, students demonstrated understandings characterized by a depth and dimension they could not have constructed from a textbook or traditional text alone” (194).