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Education Dive
Arts educators cite needs for more research on academic benefits
Linda Jacobson
Sept. 12, 2019
ALEXANDRIA, Virginia — When Nettrice Gaskins was teaching at the Boston
Arts Academy, she was asked to teach an Advanced Placement computer
science course. But she was at the school to run a new STEAM lab,
blending the arts into science, technology, engineering and math
instruction.
So she pitched the idea of teaching an arts-based computer science
course to The College Board, and they agreed. The unique approach led
to students composing music to data and a student creating a video on
the connections between jazz improvisation and quantum physics —
specifically the work of John Coltrane.
“They were all trying to apply their practice to that particular unit
in ways that I hadn’t thought of myself,” Gaskins said Wednesday during
a morning session at this year’s gathering of the Arts Education
Partnership (AEP). "Students should be able to follow into music even
though they are doing data analysis.”
Now the content manager for the Fab Foundation and an adjunct at
Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Gaskins shared her approach to
starting with aspects of culture when designing lessons and activities
for students. Inspired by the culture of Bhutan, for example, she
described connections between the importance of sewing among Bhutanese
people and the principles involved in fabrication, such as 3D printing.
In addition, it’s the “lived experiences of students” that separate
STEAM from arts integration, added Marvin Carr, a senior advisor for
STEM and community relations with the Institute of Museum and Library
Services. Dancers, for example, bring a useful perspective to the field
of robotics because of their understanding of how the body moves. And
the “camaraderie that comes with music” is the same type of
collaboration that is needed in an engineering lab, he said.
The session also focused on the partnerships necessary to support STEAM
in schools, such as the year-long STEAM program Crystal Bridges Museum
of Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, provides for the region’s 5th-graders,
which includes a field trip to the museum, but also a workbook full of
activities to make connections back to the works of art they viewed.
“Rural communities are lacking cultural institutions,” said Nile Blunt,
the head of school programs for Crystal Bridges. “When you find out
where those gaps are, hopefully there is a cultural institution that
can pick up the slack.”
Carr added that when seeking funding for such partnerships, he tends to
focus on the potential for STEAM to prepare a more competitive
workforce, and not as much on the students’ personal growth, engagement
and academic success.
One challenge is that the “arts integration world lacks the research
base that the classic STEM world has,” he said. “There needs to be a
concerted effort in producing more scholarly research.”
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