E(ART)H SCIENCE: EXPLORING EARTH THROUGH THE LENS OF ARTS AND HUMANITIES

The Earth Sciences abound with opportunities to gain deeper understanding of Earth phenomena through collaborations with colleagues from the Arts/Humanities. Fresh insights are provided and our understanding of Earth is enriched and enhanced through artistic representations that may range from documentary to metaphorical. It is worth seeking out collaborations for interdisciplinary instruction with colleagues in Arts/Humanities to represent and communicate about Earth in new and creative ways, and to instill a deeper understanding of our personal and societal connections to Earth. Examples of eARTh Science projects include: 1) a joint Earth Science-Photography class that explored human impacts of the upper Missouri River basin that culminated with a student gallery exhibition of their photographic art work; 2) the Film Dept. produced videos of “old time” dance forms as a type of kinesthetic learning activity to demonstrate symmetry operations in a Mineralogy class; 3) the “Wild Clay Project” involved Mineralogy students and ceramics students as we used XRD and SEM/EDS methods to characterize clay mineralogy of raw materials and distribution of glazes on fired products; use of common geochemical methods can be broadly applied to forensic studies of artifacts with artists and art historians; 4) collaborative work with museum curators developed a geoscience component of a larger exhibit of artifacts from the Oplontis Project—a villa that was destroyed in the AD 79 Mt. Vesuvius eruption; 5) Find inspiration about Earth in the music of Bach, Smetana and Strauss; the poetry of Whitman or Wordsworth; the paintings of Moran or Homer. These activities are built on sound pedagogical practice and encourage spatial reasoning and critical thinking. It is at the intersection of the Sciences/Engineering and Arts/Humanities that we can fully realize what it means to be human, what constitutes a meaningful life, and how we can best navigate this wild ride on Spaceship Earth.