Heather Leary
Brigham Young University
“Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice and most of all, love of what you are doing or learning to do.” –Pelé
In today’s world, success is affected by an individual’s ability to be creative and innovative, a critical thinker, and a problem solver. To foster these skills, K-12 educational institutions were tasked, through legislation, to emphasize science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). However, the often-narrow approach used to explore and teach in the STEM disciplines has had the opposite effect. Many students felt isolated and unable to be innovative, think critically, work collaboratively, or solve real-world problems.
Tackling this challenge can begin with the Arts. That is right, the performing arts of dance, music, and drama, the visual arts, and the media arts. The Arts provide the opportunity for transdisciplinarity, integrating across STEM and Arts, for a holistic approach to education and fostering creativity, innovation, critical thinking, and problem-solving (and hopefully a love of what you are doing and learning). This is well-known and practiced by Elicia Gray, a Beverley Taylor Sorenson (BTS) Arts specialist, BYU Arts Partnership professional development instructor, BYU adjunct arts instructor, and elementary arts teacher. So how did Elicia learn and then implement this idea of transdisciplinary with STEM and the Arts? How can other educators learn and do this too?
In this Blog post, I’ll tell you Elicia’s story about making connections between science and visual art that engaged her 6th-grade students. This one lesson reinforced what they were learning in their main classroom and provided a rich visual arts lesson.
Elicia’s Story
Elicia started by participating in the BYU Arts Partnership Arts Integration Endorsement that led her to becoming a BTS arts specialist.
Elicia’s approach to transdisciplinarity is quite simple. She practices what she teaches her students: to be observant, to be curious, to ask questions, to be passionate, to collaborate, and to make mistakes and learn from them.
She observes what the grade level teachers in her school are doing in their classrooms, checks in with them on the content being taught, and then turns to the arts curricula to make connections for her lessons. Sometimes this requires her to go back to the classroom teachers to ask more or very specific questions. But she is always thinking about what the students need to think about as they do their arts activity and the connections she needs to help them make or questions to ask to progress forward in their learning. She regularly hears students verbally make connections in her lessons to what they are doing or have done in their regular classrooms.
One lesson she designed and implemented was related to the change in matter taught in science. She did some exploring of her own, then some questions to a few classroom teachers. With her expertise and knowledge about the Arts, she was drawn to glass artists, knowing that a change happens when heat is applied to sand, changing it into glass. She found the wonderful glass artist Dale Chihuly and some resources about his work process and finished products, beautiful and unique glassworks.
Planning an activity for her students with glassworks was tricky though because she cannot have high heat fires at her school with students melting sand and spinning glass. Her planning needed some thoughtful design and creativity so her students could have a similar experience to the glassworks.
Using her own creativity, she decided to use clear plastic plates, a heat gun, and colored markers to simulate a glassworks activity. Her idea to color the plates, heat them, and then shape them is similar to the process used to “shrink wrap” items like food containers or other products that have protective plastic wraps. As her students began this science and arts activity, they were reminded of what they had already learned about changes in matter, and then introduced to the art process of Dale Chihuly’s glassworks and the sand to glass change in matter. Each student decorated, heated, and shaped a plate to create a unique “glassware” that was added together to create a hanging art installation.
This activity presented some habits of mind skill building in persistence, flexibility, and curiosity that provided an opportunity for the students to be creative with a visual art while physically manipulating a change in physical matter. Imagine how collaborative lessons, reaching across disciplines, can be for students at any age, what they will remember, what they can foster, and how it can excite them about the various disciplines.
Elicia believes the Arts are not just a superfluous secondary thing that is meant to support the other disciplines, but their own disciplines to learn. However, she is not just focused on content in visual arts or STEM. She wants students to think creatively using art. Another lesson focused on students designing a robot that would be useful in society today. They were presented with a challenge, a real-world challenge, and needed to identify a problem they were aware of and then build a robot that could solve that problem. Using a real-world challenge like this provided an opportunity to discuss multiple disciplines and then use them to solve the problem, as well as to build design thinking skills.
Science researchers have done some exploration of STEM and Arts together, calling for more learning opportunities where multiple disciplines engage in a problem to solve. Of course, this means that disciplinary boundaries must be crossed, and those can include curricula, physical spaces, and even attitudes. When doing something new, different, even innovative, there will be challenges and bumps along the way. But crossing the boundaries and working together will have a positive effect on the activities that can be presented in a learning environment.
Elicia has embraced transdisciplinarity and embodied that in all of her work as she teaches elementary students and higher education students preparing to enter the elementary classroom. Her lessons and interactions with students promote collaboration, individual creativity, connections with content, and improved belief in self.
Imagine what educators can do and create when they embrace transdisciplinarity and cross boundaries in support of learning. Imagine the innovation that can occur. Imagine the opportunities that can be opened. Imagine the knowledge gained. Imagine the creativity used for progress in the real world. Imagine the changes in classroom practices. Imagine the skills gained. Imagine the igniting of passions for STEM and the Arts. Imagine the increase in habits of mind. Imagine the success.
“Imagination does not become great until human beings, given the courage and strength, use it to create.” –Maria Montessori
Resources
There are many resources online that provide arts integration lessons, strategies for integrating arts-based learning, arts integration for common core, arts integration for many subjects, classroom strategies for arts integration, and an endorsement program.
About the Author
Dr. Heather Leary is an Assistant Professor of Instructional Psychology & Technology at Brigham Young University. Her research focuses on tackling complex educational challenges in K-12 and higher education to generate useable knowledge and alignment between the principles of learning and instructional practice.
Twitter: @kolorkid