TIME IN MOTION: TEACHING THE SCIENCE OF TIME THROUGH MOVEMENT

We have a kinesthetic intelligence that is often ignored in general-education undergraduate science courses. Kinesthetic learning is a powerful tool for understanding and integrating complex concepts and processes. Yet in the majority of large-format, general-education, science courses, students are asked to sit still and confine their learning to the visual and auditory. Some courses may offer a lab section that allows for movement, but many are lecture-only. This approach denies a more holistic learning style that may help those students who feel unconnected to or intimidated by science, as well as encourage deeper, long lasting connections to material presented via multiple learning modes.

“Making Interdisciplinary Connections: Time in Motion” is a course developed to focus on the kinesthetic learning of science by (primarily) general education students. Created by a Dance professor (Mansur) and a Geoscience professor (Anderson) at Winona State University, this course explored scientific concepts of time (for example, measuring the passage of time via astronomy and geology) primarily through movement and fine arts. Mansur taught the students how to use a basic version of Laban Movement Analysis to consider the micro/macro connections between the function and expression of human movement and movement that occurs in nature. The course also examined how movement and visual artists use, represent, and are influenced by Time. While the class met in a dance studio and moved every day, the class also visited the flume lab in the Geoscience department, the observatory, the library, and went on a field trip to a local cave and a quarry. For their final project, students worked in groups to research a scientific concept involving time (time dilation near a black hole, for example) and then created a movement piece that embodied key ideas as well as personal and aesthetic connections to the material.

In this presentation, we will describe how this project was initiated and supported, as well as received by the students. We will give examples of kinesthetic activities used to help the students explore and experience science within their own bodies. And we may ask the audience to do the same!