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The Scholarly and Creative in N-YHS Collaboration with Saint David's Students

This semester, one highly visible way that the scholarly and creative intersect at Saint David's is through our longstanding Lower School partnership with the New-York Historical Society. In Grades One, Two and Three, an art historian from N-YHS visits weekly with the boys for hands-on classes she co-teaches with Saint David's teachers. These sessions dig into historical facts and issues through creative art projects, often utilizing art mediums representative of the time period under study.

First graders are learning about how their city has evolved in the thousands of years since the Lenni-Lenape Native Americans inhabited the land. Their understanding will be made visible in their creations of Manhattan maps that track this evolution, and ultimately will include an architectural 3D component to accommodate the addition of current-day skyscrapers.

Second graders are exploring the development of New Amsterdam. In a recent class, they were charged with creating watercolor still lifes based on a collection of period household items, to reflect the life of Dutch settlers. The boys had the freedom to select whatever color palette they wanted when rendering their versions of the still life. As one boy observed, although they were all drawing the same thing, "Each artwork is unique in its own way." Each boy's understanding is like that too, unique, and dependent upon the intellectual and personal connection he makes with material.

Third graders are immersed in an in-depth investigation of immigration to America at the turn of the 20th century. Throughout this study, the boys step into the shoes of the immigrant to develop a deepened understanding and empathy for the experience. In a recent session with the N-YHS, the boys tried to solve a typical abstract "puzzle test" that Ellis Island processors used to measure immigrants' "mental fitness." In future sessions, the boys will create expressionist drawings depicting the thoughts and feelings of immigrants who made the challenging journey to a new land, far from their homes and loved ones.

The "scholarly and creative" may often be thought of separately, as left vs. right brain activity, but they are very much interconnected and interdependent. When our boys engage in active, diligent study and reasoned debate, when simple knowledge levels up to deeper understanding; it is then that they can creatively expand their comprehension and generate something new. Our partnership with the N-YHS leverages the artistic process to do just that.


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