SUPPORTING STUDENT LEARNING OF GEOSCIENCE CONCEPTS THROUGH NON-TRADITIONAL MEANS: A PROTOTYPAL TEXTBOOK ON ART AND GEOLOGY

A long-standing approach to general education in higher education institutions is the distribution model, in which students select from a menu of discipline-specific introductory courses. However, there is growing enthusiasm for teaching introductory-level concepts through courses that examine a subject's interdisciplinary connections. Encounters with science students who were intimidated by art appreciation courses and art students who were daunted by the sciences led the authors of this abstract, a geologist and an art educator, respectively, to develop and offer a general education course on Art and Geology. In preparing the course, the authors readily identified other such classes that were being offered at a variety of institutions; however, a fundamental challenge was the dearth of available educational materials in support of an Art and Geology course. To address this need, an educational materials development “proof-of-concept” project was undertaken, resulting in the generation of the first two chapters of an envisioned Art and Geology textbook. The plan for full-scale development calls for these two chapters to serve as exemplars on which additional chapters, to be developed by art and geology instructors from other institutions, will be based. A key aim of this presentation will be to share and discuss with others the prototypal chapters and to recruit potential collaborators for the next stage of the project.

Each chapter of the envisioned textbook will focus on a single theme or art medium (such as ceramics or sculpture). The two chapters of the current prototype represent one of each: European Ice Age Cave Art and Gems, Jewelry & Metalsmithing. The chapters are designed to support active learning by students in a studio approach in which learning of concepts is integrated with hands-on activities, such as through case studies and in-class exercises. A unifying and innovative element of the chapters is the visual-rich foldout that forms the basis for student activities and problem-solving. For example, the Jewelry through the Ages Timeline traces the history of gems, jewelry, and metalsmithing over the past 5,000 years and is used for multiple application questions.

This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants No. 0231106 and 0611600.