Tim Barringer Led National Seminar for Public School Teachers

Tim Barringer, Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art, served as a national seminar leader for the 2025 program of the Yale National Initiative to strengthen teaching in public schools. Established in 2005 by the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute, the Initiative offers seminars led by Yale faculty for K-12 teachers from participating school districts across the country.

Barringer’s seminar, “Art, Design, and Biology,” asked teachers who specialize in fine art, language arts, social sciences, and sciences to think together about how to use skills of close looking in teaching. How can looking at art help us understand science? And how can scientific thinking enhance our understanding of art. The seminars ran from May to August, including a two-week Intensive Session in July when the seminar met daily. Each Fellow completed the seminar by creating a curriculum unit to teach in their classroom.

A four-time national seminar leader, Barringer describes the collegiality at the heart of the Initiative’s national seminars: “This is not a typical seminar taught by a professor with students getting a grade with a big divide in the room between the person who knows everything and the people who know nothing. Rather, it is a Yale seminar at its best, which is a bunch of people sitting in a room and creating a community in which we all together can think through a topic.”

This press release was prepared by the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute for open distribution