I take my students to the Metropolitan Museum every semester. They use their phones to research the art, and to take notes for later—even though they know I'm not going to test them on that knowledge. Phones in museums are good. (Also, between tours, I [gasp] check Twitter.)
My students, for the record, are community college students from the Bronx. Most of them have never been to the Met before, despite living a 20-30 minute subway ride away.
And if I turned them loose in a gallery like the one above without any contextualization, most of them would be bored to tears—as I was, despite growing up going to the Met for fun, before I started researching those paintings that I could lead my students on those tours.
And you want to know how I did that research, and how I do that research today when my students ask me a question I don't know the answer to? I'll give you one guess.
(Fun fact: That photo was taken in Gallery 631 of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of the very galleries that I bring my students to for our HIS 202 tours. The students she's shaming could literally be my own.)
