Paint a scientific depiction of a plant species for an integrated lesson.
Integration of arts and sciences involves a type of administering education that is beneficial in many ways. Making connections across subject boundaries helps students to understand ideas in new ways. Whether you want to integrate visual arts with botany, biology and music or astronomy and sculpture you will find a way to do this through some simple techniques, as described by Julia Marshall, Professor of Art Education at San Francisco State University.
Instructions
1. Grow a class garden to integrate art and science through mimicry. Mimicry is a great tool for the educator. This process involves getting the students to mimic projects or activities that professionals would undergo in the real world. Students learn about ecology, agriculture, botany and biology. Additionally, students can create art that is functional in the garden such as row signs, trellises, germinators and watering instruments. Upon harvesting, students learn how their scientific effort goes into producing an artful meal.
2. Show students how master artists, such as Botticelli and Da Vinci, proportioned their pieces of art to depict something on a scientifically real level. Depiction is the simplest and most straight forward strategy for art and science integration. Art of all ages involves depicting something in the natural world. Proportional depictions are important in virtually any architecture, manufacturing and engineering business. Learning to depict something to scale involves geometry and algebra along with artistic skill.
3. Take a subject out of its original context and put it into a new format to encourage new ways of understanding it. Julia Marshall writes that this type of education could involve "charting one's emotional world as a geologic map or arranging characters from popular culture like specimens in a natural history exhibit." Because this idea is somewhat advanced, it is advised to undergo these projects with students of middle school level and above.
4. Introduce the artistic understanding of metaphor by using it to depict a scientific idea. Using metaphor at all is considered an art and by asking students to describe or depict scientific processes metaphorically you are integrating these subjects. Interpretive dance is one way of accomplishing this idea. Tell students to depict a scientific process such as growing a crop from seed, mapping the stars or solving an algebraic equation through dance. Another way is to draw a metaphorical image of a scientific scene, such as David Wojnarowicz painting of a man looking into a microscope as his body is filled with planets and stars.
Tags: depict scientific, botany biology, depict something, Julia Marshall, this idea
