STEM + Arts Series | Research Practice Partnership | Dr. Heather Leary & Tina McCulloch

09/06/22 • 22 min

Artful Teaching

Links mentioned in this episode:

Rocky Mountain Arts and STEM Think Tank

Supporting Teachers with STEM and Arts Integration in the Classroom

**Listeners, take note: this is not a STEAM podcast series, but a series of episodes focused on STEM and the arts.

Today’s host Heather Francis, with co-host Tina McCulloch, introduces a series on STEM and the Arts. This podcast is important because teachers need practical, applicable examples of what STEM plus the arts or the arts plus STEM look like in the classroom. The experts and teachers in this and future episodes offer insight and experience to our listeners.
Dr. Heather Leary is today’s guest and is a professor in the Instructional Psychology and Technology department at Brigham Young University. This episode explores the distinctions of STEM and the arts, and discusses Dr. Leary’s collaborative STEM and arts project.

Tina is an elementary school teacher with 13 years of experience who integrates the arts into her classroom because the arts create connection, are part of her teaching persona, and help students “recognize the interconnectedness of our learning.”

Dr. Leary has a bachelor's degree in fine arts and began her career as a photographer. Over time, her STEM-focused personal and professional lives overlapped (doing research, working with classroom teachers, and doing professional development). STEM offers a powerful, systemic way to consider content, think about critical thinking and problem solving: STEM is a holistic and simultaneously fun, creative, and engaging approach to learning.

Definition of STEM + Arts — Reaching for Transdisciplinarity

Integrating STEM with the arts helps teachers move towards transdisciplinarity, or emphasizing the natural connections and overlap from arts into science, arts into math, and arts into technology.

Arts + STEM ←→ STEM + Arts

The relationship between STEM and the arts is symbiotic: the relationship goes both ways. Classroom teachers can integrate the arts into STEM-based content, and arts teachers can include science, math, engineering and technology into their lessons. Arts educators do just as much as STEM in art classrooms, and not in a superficial way, but in a powerful way—these connections show up in very deep, problem-solving ways, compelling teachers and students to think critically. The arts aren’t limited to just visual arts, but include all the art forms—theatre, music, dance, visual—and choosing an appropriate artform can support students as they work through problems.

As a dance math teacher, Heather Francis describes an example of a classroom application for using dance as a way to teach mathematical patterning to build the skill of mathematical visualization.

In practical terms, students’ math problem might be: given the length of a flagpole’s shadow, calculate the length of a flagpole. Students likely have difficulty understanding that a flagpole has a shadow. Teachers can choose the artforms of visual art and/or dance: students can draw a flagpole and include its shadow, and/or perform shadow dances. This practice of artform-based patterning translates into larger applications, when students have their own interesting problem due to their experience with an art process informing their mathematical learning and the math informing their creative expression.

Supporting Utah Elementary Teachers’ Implementation of SEEd

The SEEd standards are the new science standards for Utah elementary schools. The greatest influence in the classroom is the teacher, so effective professional development for teachers really spreads to the students. Dr. Leary describes how her research-practice collaboration with Provo teachers is influenced by the district’s emphasis on STEM education.

STEM + the arts are mutually inclusive. Together with Dr. Leary, the arts and classroom teachers are exploring and defining what SEEd-focused teaching looks like using STEM and the arts. They have identified the following needs

Teachers need to understand the SEEd standards.
Teachers need collaboration to create arts adaptations to SEEd-focused lesson plans.
Teachers need continued support as they work to implement the STEM and arts lesson plans.

Teachers ask questions like these:

How can I integrate this using _____art form?
What are the standards I am responsible for?
When do the SEEd standards overlap with the arts standards?

In order to build capacity for teachers and develop students’ skills and knowledge, Dr. Leary and the classroom and arts teachers collaborate to design and implement lesson plans, and collect data from these classrooms. This research-practice partnership is unique because it brings together teachers from different schools and different g...

Links mentioned in this episode:

Rocky Mountain Arts and STEM Think Tank

Supporting Teachers with STEM and Arts Integration in the Classroom

**Listeners, take note: this is not a STEAM podcast series, but a series of episodes focused on STEM and the arts.

Definition of STEM + Arts — Reaching for Transdisciplinarity

Integrating STEM with the arts helps teachers move towards transdisciplinarity, or emphasizing the natural connections and overlap from arts into science, arts into math, and arts into technology.

Arts + STEM ←→ STEM + Arts

As a dance math teacher, Heather Francis describes an example of a classroom application for using dance as a way to teach mathematical patterning to build the skill of mathematical visualization.

Supporting Utah Elementary Teachers’ Implementation of SEEd

Teachers need to understand the SEEd standards.
Teachers need collaboration to create arts adaptations to SEEd-focused lesson plans.
Teachers need continued support as they work to implement the STEM and arts lesson plans.

Teachers ask questions like these:

How can I integrate this using _____art form?
What are the standards I am responsible for?
When do the SEEd standards overlap with the arts standards?

Previous Episode

Native American Series 2 | Frog’s Teeth | Dovie Thomason, Storyteller

Dovie Thomason at the Arts Express Summer Conference 2022

Today, we have a treat for you—-a sneak peek of what you’ll get at Arts Express Summer Conference from one of our fabulous presenters, Dovie Thomason, a Native American storyteller and author. After we tell you a bit more about Dovie and her experiences, we will share a recording of one of the stories she performed and recorded for the Utah Division of Arts and Museums in 2020, titled “Frog’s Teeth.”

The Story Behind the Story “Frog’s Teeth”

This story comes from a series titled “Stories Grandma Told Me.” This is not a story Dovie heard from her grandma. It was a story given to her when she was the mother of a child beginning to lose their teeth. The person who gave Dovie this story received it from her father’s traditions as part of the Oneida First Nation in Ontario, Canada.

We thank Jean Tokuda Irwin and our partners at the Utah Division of Arts and Museums for granting permission to use this recording and for introducing us to Dovie and sponsoring her at Arts Express this summer as a keynote speaker and presenter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGD_KkI4Ibg

Dovie Thomason Biography

Coming from the rich oral tradition of her Lakota and Plains Apache family, Dovie Thomason has had a lifetime of listening and telling the traditional Native stories that are the cultural “heartsong” of community values and memory. Both wise and mischievous, Dovie unfolds the layers of her indigenous worldview and teachings with respect, sly humor and rich vocal transformations.

When she adds personal stories and untold histories, the result is a contemporary narrative of Indigenous North America told with elegance, wit, and passion. Her programs are a heartfelt sharing of Native stories she has had the privilege of hearing from Elders of many nations and are woven with why we need stories, how stories are a cultural guide in shaping values and making responsible choices, how stories build communities and celebrates our relationship with the Earth and all living beings.

The oral tradition she gifts to listeners inspires delight in spoken language arts, encourages reading, supports literacy, can be used in classrooms to motivate better writing as students experience storytelling techniques, literary devices and effective communication. All of this takes place while they are exploring their own narratives and family values. Dovie has represented the U.S. as the featured storyteller throughout the world.

In 2015, she was honored as the storyteller-writer in residence at the Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture at the University of Manitoba in Canada. Dovie has used her storytelling to advise the UCLA Film School on narrative in modern film, NASA on indigenous views of technology, the Smithsonian Associates’ Scholars Program and the premier TEDx Leadership Conference. Her role as a traditional cultural artist and educator has been honored by the National Storytelling Network’s ORACLE: Circle of Excellence Award and the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers’ Traditional Storyteller Award.

Links Mentioned:

Register for Arts Express
Dovie Thomason’s Website
More stories by Dovie on the Utah Division of Arts and Museums YouTube Channel

Next Episode

STEM + Arts Series | Integration Energized My Students’ Interest | Lisa Galindo, Elicia Gray, & Jennifer Heldenbrand

Links Mentioned in this Episode:

University of Utah’s Marriott Library Book Arts Program for Teachers
Peter and the Wolf
Flight of the Bumblebee
William Tell Overture
Arts Express Summer Conference

Three STEM + Arts Research Participants Share Their Educational Experience and Backgrounds

Today’s guests are arts integrators in the research practice partnership through BYU and the Provo City School District: a visual art teacher, a teacher from a Title 1 school, and a teacher in a dual language immersion program (DLI). Welcome to Elicia Gray, Lisa Galindo, and Jennifer Hildebrand. To learn more about this research partnership, please listen to episode 28.

(Elicia Gray) I'm Elicia Gray, and I teach K-12. I mostly spend my time at elementary school teaching art integrated with other subjects, but visual art is my primary subject. I was interested in this research project because I seek collaboration with other teachers who know more about science than I do. I wanted to understand authentic science connections that I could make with visual art projects in the classroom.

(Lisa Galindo) I'm Lisa Galindo. I teach third grade at Provo Peaks Elementary. I just finished my masters of STEM education. I have always loved the arts, was invited to the group, and want to learn how to integrate arts with STEM.

(Jennifer Heldenbrand) I'm Jennifer Heldenbrand and I teach sixth grade at Canyon Crest Elementary. I have been teaching for several years and have always enjoyed doing art projects with my kids, but wanted to have a better understanding of how to pull art and science topics together.

(Tina McCulloch) Okay, well, what a nice diversity of backgrounds. . All of us together really do have some interesting backgrounds. But also that idea of I can take my STEM core and add some arts or as Elicia says I can take my arts and add some STEM into it. It's all for the betterment of our teaching and to engage our students. So I would just like you to share a story of an experience that you've had in your classroom where you engaged your students in an arts integration and what extra outcomes happened. Whether it was you got to know your students a little bit differently or the content really came alive.

Engaging Students in Arts Integration Creates Deeper Learning

Moon Phases Cyclical Bookmaking

(Jennifer Hildenbrand) Our class looked at the phases of the moon. One of the things that I did was show a picture of the moon, probably a vintage 1930’s or 1920’s picture of the moon, maybe with a scarf around its head as if it were not feeling very well and looking a little pensive. That visual opened the door to a lot of discussion. One student in particular said, “I think I'm seeing a crescent moon. I think it's a waxing crescent moon.” The class stopped and thought: “Where does this come from? What's giving you this idea?” There was a shadow around the edge of that picture that was able to help the student think through tha ideat. From there, we learned the moon phases; we talked about why they occur; and students’ questions became quite intricate. The students wanted to know more—they were practicing inquiry-based learning. From there, we created some lovely, cyclical books that allowed them to create their own version of the moon phases.

Create your own Bioluminescent Fish to Adapt to the Deep Sea Environs

(Elicia Gray) I think people forget that artists and scientists have a lot in common. When I was thinking about what I wanted to do with my students, I tried to approach these scientific principles the same way as I would approach art principles. For example: “Let's discover something new. Let's notice something new. Let's try to solve a problem.” Both artists and scientists are problem solvers.

During the unit on ecosystems, my students studied deep sea fish. We started with this question: “What would keep an organism alive in the deep sea?” I was really fascinated by the idea of bioluminescence. That's one of the fun things that I get to do as an art teacher: I get to just really explore something that I want to know about and then share what I find fascinating with the students. I wanted to learn about bioluminescent fish: Why do they light up in the dark? What artistic principles would be similar to or evident in that process?

We watched a lot of videos about what deep sea organisms did. We found out why they glow in the dark. Sometimes it was to attract food or to attr...