This curriculum kit was developed as a resource by the Tampa Museum of Art (TMA) for Hillsborough County Public School (HCPS) teachers through the support of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). For the 2025-2026 school year, the NEA awarded the Tampa Museum of Art a Grant for the Arts to expand TMA’s tour program to help students grow their world culture knowledge as seen through the lens of art. This grant provided equitable access to the Museum, allowing TMA to:
- Provide HCPS students with the opportunity to identify and analyze historical, social, and cultural contexts
- Encourage critical and aesthetic responses to art
- Promote understanding of the influence of transportation, trade, communication, science, and technology
Through a focus on world cultures, the TMA tour program utilized thinking routines that drew out students’ observations and interpretations, and encouraged students to articulate their reasoning with evidence and to question and investigate, enabling them to use their critical thinking skills. Along with enriching the TMA tour program, the NEA Grant for the Arts provided the means for the Museum to further expand and enhance its teacher training program. By providing this curriculum kit and strengthening programs for teachers and students, the Museum offered HCPS teachers a comprehensive set of resources for the 2025-2026 school year that nurtured students’ higher order thinking skills and expanded their worldview.
Contributors:
- Emma Chandler, Curriculum Writer
- Henry Bryson, Curriculum Writer
- Elizabeth Osborn, Curriculum Writer
- Paige Boscia, Graphic and Communications Designer
- Danette Albino, Manager for K12 Learning and Access
- Brittny Bevel, Head of Guided and Gallery-Based Learning
Download the curriculum kit below!
Resources on Thinking Routines
This PDF goes over the best practices of facilitating conversations that encourages critical thinking, including instructions on how to utilize See, Think, Wonder and Thinking Visually. This also includes handouts that can be used throughout the curriculum kit or for other lesson plans.
Egyptian Scarab
Students will learn about the world of ancient Egypt through the hieroglyphic alphabet, maps, and a helpful creepy crawly friend – the scarab beetle. They will annotate a map to find important locations: geographic features, trading partners, and resources. Then, students will learn how to write their name in hieroglyphs, while learning about the significance of the insect used to convey this name. The graphic organizers can be the end of the exercise, or the student-artists can make a three-dimensional scarab using papier mâché or even clay. The lesson plan and handouts are in one PDF while the teaching poster is in another PDF.
Willie Cole
In this interdisciplinary arts-integrated lesson, students examine Sunflower by contemporary artist Willie Cole from the Tampa Museum of Art’s permanent collection to explore the historical legacy of the transatlantic slave trade. The lesson uses visual analysis, historical inquiry, and critical thinking to help students understand how systems of trade shaped cultural memory, identity, and artistic expression within the African diaspora. It ends with students creating an artistic or written response to the lesson.
In this 2–3 lesson sequence, students analyze Sunflower by Willie Cole, an assemblage artwork composed of flattened irons arranged in a floral pattern. Students use the I See, I Think, I Wonder critical thinking routine to interpret how Cole transforms everyday objects associated with Black domestic labor into symbols of African diasporic history. Students then study the triangular trade system, focusing on the forced movement of enslaved Africans, exchanged commodities, and economic motivations. Finally, students create either a visual artwork or written reflection connecting historical trade systems to contemporary artistic expression. The project explores how trade systems shaped cultural memory, identity, and artistic representation in the African diaspora. The lesson plan and handouts are in one PDF while the slides and teaching poster is in another PDF.
Purvis Young
In this lesson, students explore the cultural, historical, and community storytelling found in Purvis Young: Redux. Purvis Young, a self-taught artist from Overtown in Miami, Florida, created layered paintings on scrap wood, doors, cardboard, and found materials to document everyday life, struggle, hope, and resilience in his community. His artwork responds to the ways transportation systems, specifically city development and expressways changed neighborhoods and people’s lives, and to the way communication through public art gave voice to stories that were often unheard.
This is a scalable project that invites students to express their own ideas through layered, panel-style artworks inspired by Purvis Young’s scrap wood aesthetic. Students will choose between two creative directions: My Scrapwood Story, which focuses on communication and sharing a message or story that needs to be seen, or Routes & Roots, which focuses on movement and the “routes” students plan to take in life and the “roots” that shape who they are. Using symbolic imagery, repetition, and meaningful design choices, students will create artworks that communicate identity, experience, and community in the spirit of Purvis Young’s Goodbread Alley murals. The lesson plan and handouts are in one PDF while the teaching poster is in another PDF.
If this has sparked your interest to arrange a field trip to TMA, please visit our Schools Tours page to learn more and book a visit.