ART-GEOSCIENCE INTERSECTIONS FOR BETTER TEACHING AND LEARNING

The arts are a powerful tool for sparking interest in the geosciences, enhancing understanding of complex concepts, and encouraging diverse ways of thinking. They invite participation in the classroom by students who are otherwise uncomfortable engaging with STEM concepts, inspire curiosity and innovation by geoscientists of all ages and experience levels, and train important observational skills that can be applied across the geoscience subfields. Despite these obvious benefits, the relationship between the geosciences and the arts is frequently overlooked, and intentional collaboration between the two fields of study rarely occurs. In this work, I conducted a systematic literature review to study how arts-based interventions are implemented in geoscience research and education and to explore how the arts and humanities have engaged with the geosciences in their own teaching and research. Four databases (Web of Science, SCOPUS, EBSCO, and ProQuest), were searched using a common search string: (geoscience OR "earth science" OR geology) AND (education OR teaching OR intersection OR engagement OR interdisciplinary) AND AB=("science and art" OR arts OR humanities) NOT ("state of the art") NOT ("humanity"). This search identified 775 relevant documents which were then deduplicated, screened, and coded using thematic analysis. Initial findings from this study indicate that efforts to implement the arts in the geosciences are typically well-received on an individual classroom or project basis, but that their broader use is often hindered by extremely narrow applications and an overall lack of evaluation. In addition, this literature review demonstrates that a significant portion of ongoing geoscience-art intersections work is not captured by published peer-reviewed literature, meaning that researchers and educators who might benefit from implementing related interventions and ideas in their own fields of practice may not even be aware that they exist. This work suggests that geoscientists and artists at all levels stand to reap massive benefits from participating in interdisciplinary interventions involving both fields, but that future efforts to use the arts in the geosciences and vice versa must be evaluated and disseminated at a much broader scale in order to be truly effective.