FROM CANVAS TO CURRICULUM: INCORPORATING ART MUSEUMS INTO GEOSCIENCE COURSES TO CULTIVATE SKILL DEVELOPMENT AND INCLUSIVITY

Partnerships between on-campus art museums and college courses may seem natural in the humanities and unexpected in STEM, but here we demonstrate how art can be meaningfully incorporated into college geology curriculum by offering novel ways of practicing close observation, hypothesis formulation, and critical thinking. Through planned visits to the Allen Memorial Art Museum in college-level geoscience courses at Oberlin College, we explored how an art museum can be a setting for scientific learning, extending and deepening ideas first encountered in the classroom. We demonstrate the pedagogical benefits of the art museum visits in three geoscience courses: "Lessons from Life History," "Geology in Our National Parks," and "Evolution of the Earth." These courses, spanning from introductory to intermediate levels, cater to diverse student backgrounds and interests, including non-STEM majors and geosciences majors alike. Each of these courses is a possible pathway to declaring a geosciences major at Oberlin. In all cases, these art museum visits helped to (1) enrich the “classroom” geo-curriculum, (2) equip students with essential STEM skills, and (3) foster inclusivity for students that were new to, or apprehensive about, geoscience coursework, but perhaps were more familiar with art spaces or media. During the museum visits, students consider key thematic ideas (e.g., “Science is a visual story”) and questions (e.g., “Where and how do we see the passage of time?”) in artworks to draw parallels between interpreting observational evidence in both art and geology. A final important outcome is the realization that science is based upon testable, falsifiable hypotheses. The three different museum visit models discussed here – combined with student feedback on the experiences – offer opportunities to consider how the skills requisite for observing and interpreting art are transferable to geosciences and other STEM domains. The outcomes of art museum visits, therefore, are central, not ancillary, to geoscience learning.