Finding Good Questions: Introducing Science through Contemporary Art
Identifying a good question is the start of path-breaking science; educational research shows that question-finding is also fundamental to learning basic-level science. For beginning students, prior experience may obstruct learning. For example, when physicist and educator Derek Muller evaluated what students learned from science videos, he got a shock. Even the best expository films, the ones students praised as engaging and easy to follow, reinforced the ideas about science that the students already held. Even when those ideas were wrong. Students successfully grasped new ideas, Muller found, only when they began to question what they already “knew.” This presentation discusses the use of contemporary art to stimulate generative questions for introductory biology students. In the course “Life Studies: Biology & Art,” co-taught by a biologist and artist, contemporary art related to science serves as a powerful catalyst for student questions, facilitating learning in three ways: 1) challenging habits of explanation 2) raising the emotional stakes of understanding and 3) storing content in memory through images. It also productively calls into question the ways that people think with images, reverse engineering art to see science and science to see art. The pedagogical challenges discussed include developing meaningful cross-disciplinary comparisons, creating beginning level research projects that embody the dual approach, and effectively using an interdisciplinary, diversely informed history of ideas to support student learning. In an art school context, the pedagogical rewards include developing creative fluency, fostering critical thinking, and supporting new career paths for artists in research.
Associate Professor
San Francisco Art Institute
Meredith Tromble’s work explores collaboration and art as a way of knowing through drawing, text, performance, and physical and virtual installations. From 2000 to 2010, she worked primarily through the artist group Stretcher, creating installations and performances and publishing an online magazine. During the same period, she developed a performance persona, Anti-Pandora, who translated the energy of her motion into electricity with a special “backpack” and was based on the research of biologist Larry Rome. A second persona, Madame Entropy, occasionally delivers performances and lectures on art history. Since 2011, Tromble has been an artist in residence at the Complexity Sciences Center at the University of California, Davis. There she and geobiologist Dawn Sumner are developing an interactive digital installation, The Dream Vortex, that has been presented internationally. In 2014 Tromble and Sumner were among the eleven fellows selected for the first Djerassi Artist Residency Program in art and science.
