9th Annual 21st Century Learning Conference

“ Artists and scientists never really get an opportunity to communicate. Scientists often see themselves as not being creative and artists often see themselves as being non- scientific….and thats absolutely not the case. Technical skill plus creativity equals innovation. We are not going to innovate our world if we don't have more people coming to the table sharing their disciplines to create.”  

•  Dr. Christophe E. Jackson 
  Scientist and Musician 
  Researched intersections between music and engineering 

 

Peter is a science teacher that is still practicing his art form through the media of photography using elements & principles of design to capture his travels and macro insects. 

Brittany is a visual art teacher who studied Neuroscience who still practices her own art form through large scale paintings and drawings, whose subject matter is heavily influenced by the sciences. 

This past year, we decided to disrupt learning in the way our students view the arts and sciences. Often, they are are seen as separate things - rational facts vs. creative exploration. It came with challenges as our school follows a traditional block schedule but we made it possible whenever and wherever we could giving students an alternative learning path in and across both classes. 
We believe STEAM, Design Thinking, Elements & Principles of Design, etc. are all pointing students to the same way of thinking - so we’ve presented them to students as one thing; using the same language and actively aligning our processes we used in both classrooms to talk about both art and science.

Referencing Da Vinci as a ultimate practitioner of both art and science - we used many of his theories to make our works come to life. 

We will roll out our own STEAM and Scientific Illustration class curriculums and give teachers the opportunity to be hands on and try a variety of our projects and give practical ways we connected our science and art classes. 

 

Those experiences and lesson plans include but aren't limited to: 

physiology through medical illustration and dissections - to render organisms and scientific process through illustration from a greater understanding of their structures and functions- to implement design thinking to create machines or program arduinos that will interact with art materials creating final art pieces - photography tricks to capture a more dynamic view of the microscopic world - using & improving artistic techniques for any teacher to take visual and visible learning to the next level in the classroom in any and all scientific illustrations.