Last year, the museum partnered with the Hawai‘i State Department of Education and Hanahau‘oli School’s Professional Development Center to launch a program that would create and distribute a series of art education posters using works from the museum’s permanent collection. The first poster, which was published in November 2014, featured Juliette May Fraser’s painting Lei Sellers and was sent out to every public classroom in the state—a total of 255 schools.
In addition to integrating arts education into classrooms that might not otherwise have access to it, the posters are intended to develop visual literacy, critical thinking, and interpretive skills in Hawai‘i students by encouraging them to “read” a work of art using the ODIC (Observe, Describe, Interpret, and Connect) process.
“We thought it would be a great way to get Hawai‘i students familiar with works of art from the museum,” says HoMA’s teacher liaison Jenny Engle. “If students are introduced to how to read a visual work of art, these skills can translate into reading works of literature.”
At Pōmaika‘i Elementary School, which has an impressive extracurricular video production program, students made the most recent poster the focus of their Pōmaika‘i Keiki Honua News segment. Talented 4th and 5th graders led their fellow students through the ODIC process.
The poster, the third in the series, features Hubert Vos’s Kolomona: Hawaiian Troubadour. The museum’s education department and the DOE is working on the next one, which features the museum’s iconic painting The Lei Seller, and will go out to classrooms before the end of the school year.
Mahalo to creative literacy teacher Gina Smith and the media team at Pomaika‘i Elementary, for sharing this video with us!