44. Museum Program

For over thirty years, Dalton’s Museum Program has promoted object-based teaching and learning across the K–12 curriculum, collaborating with teachers and building a collection of objects, specimens and images to enhance visual and scientific literacy. This replica of a camel with a Sogdian rider helps third graders visualize trade along the Silk Road.

Tang horses, Mughal manuscript paintings, Baltic amber, and Paleolithic stone tools — these are just a few of the hundreds of objects drawn from the Museum Program’s collection and all accessible to Dalton students and faculty. For over 30 years, Dalton’s Museum Program has been promoting object-based teaching and learning across the K-12 curriculum. Its current staff — trained in the disciplines of art history and anthropology — collaborate with classroom teachers and specialists inside and outside the school to enhance visual and scientific literacy at Dalton — at the same time scaffolding age-appropriate skills of focused looking and critical thinking across the grades. In addition to creating rich interactive learning opportunities for students in museum and classroom settings, the program also provides professional development to teachers on an individual basis. It relies upon a wide range of resources: long-standing formal relationships with local cultural institutions, especially the American Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Morgan Library & Museum, an extensive teaching collection of objects and specimens, and an in-house database of digital art images. This replica of a ceramic camel with a Sogdian rider is one of the objects the Museum program teachers use to bring global history alive — in this case, to help third grade students visualize the movement of goods and ideas across the Silk Road in the early first millennium CE.
—Michelle Marcus, PhD, Art Historian, Dalton  Museum Program