From student to docent: Course trains new guides

By Tara Sahdev

Next quarter, the docents of Santa Clara's the de Saisset Museum will be offering a class that is artsy and fun: Explore With Me.

The main purpose of Explore With Me is to teach students how to give art museum tours with a focus on the art in the de Saisset Museum.

What makes this class more unique than most, besides its objective, is that it is taught solely by Santa Clara students who have already taken the course.

Senior art history majors Brianna Lewke, Scott Dow and Hermione Sharp will teach other students about the art in the de Saisset Museum and how to relay that information as tour guides to visitors.

The class, which is taught every Tuesday and Thursday from 6 to 8 p.m., illustrates an interactive way of touring called Visual Thinking Strategy.

"Rather than just lecturing, we open up a discussion about each piece of art," said Lewke, who said that this makes the tours more interesting and fun for visitors.

The training lasts for five weeks, after which the students meet once a week to give their own tours at the de Saisset Museum.

To pass Explore With Me, students must give three tours and write a reflection paper and a visual analysis paper. The class is graded on a pass/fail basis, and teachers have never had to fail anyone.

"We are there to have fun with the students and goof around and make jokes, but sometimes it's hard once we establish a friendship or relationship with the students to then be their teachers," said Dow. "It's obviously difficult when people in the class are like, 'You are the same age as me.'"

"It's a fun and easy way to learn about art, help your public speaking, get two credits and make friends," said Lewke. "Honestly, there are so many of the docents that we have become good friends with or they have become friends with each other."

Lewke, Dow and Sharp first heard about this opportunity through their art history classes, since students cannot yet sign up for the class online.

The three are proud to have expanded the program. When Lewke took the class, there were only two students, but this quarter, there are eleven.

"The worst tour I had was when I had 50 fifth-graders," Dow recalled.

"The chaperones weren't doing their jobs at all," he said. "It was basically chaos."

Students were running around, screaming and touching all the art, he explained.

"I remember at the end being like, 'Everyone sit on the floor, we are just going to calm down and try to talk about the art.'

"But this was during the '60s exhibit," he added. "So it was all abstract art that the students couldn't be involved in at all."

It isn't required to be an art or art history major to take this class. In fact, this quarter, the majority of the students have other majors.

The class, which is offered every quarter, can be taken twice and counts as an elective or as a lower or upper division art history major requirement.

Each quarter, the exhibits in the museum change. "It's pretty shocking that a school of our size gets renowned artists," said Dow.

This student-taught docent program was started by a student who compiled all the lectures and materials to teach the class herself in 2003. Emily Lewis, the founder of Explore With Me, is now working as a tour guide at the Los Altos History Museum.

The program is ready to convert winter quarter's students into the new docents.

Contact Tara Sahdev at (408) 551-1918 or tsahdev@scu.edu.