THE ART AND SCIENCE OF TEACHING FIELD SKETCHING IN A HIGH SCHOOL CLASSROOM

Observation skills are a critical component of success in geology classes. We often ask students to sketch what they see without teaching the skills needed to produce a useful sketch. As Geology teachers in a high school, we do not have the expertise to teach these sketching skills. This is the driving need behind our project.

We recruited art teachers to teach basic art concepts such as contouring, shading, perspective, scale and proportion, and texture. The art teachers visited and taught in the geology classes over several days. Students worked in their sketch books during this time. After the presentations by the art teachers, the geology teachers discussed the geologic perspective of the images and how to annotate a sketch to produce the most accurate and helpful field sketch.

This project culminated in field trips where students sketched outcrops, combining both their art and geologic skills. The focus was to produce a sketch with annotation of important geologic features.

This project started with one school in the 2017-18 school year and expanded to two schools in the 2018-19 school year. This expansion increased the number of students impacted from 25 students the first year to 85 students the second year.

Our results are qualitative, but we continue improve our curriculum and streamline the process to improve the experience for students, teachers and data collection.