STEM + Arts Podcast

This fall the BYU ARTS Partnership produced a series on the Artful Teaching Podcast focused on STEM and arts integration.

The STEM + Arts series was designed and produced by Tina McCulloch, a classroom teacher and PhD candidate from the Provo City School District, and Heather Francis, a podcast host, and designer from the BYU ARTS Partnership.

Tina McCulloch, working in a research-practice partnership with professor Heather Leary from the BYU Instructional Psychology and Technology department, saw the need for more classroom teachers to understand the power and potential of collaborating with arts educators on STEM lesson plans. So, Tina set up interviews with BTS arts educators, district arts coaches, and classroom teachers who have experienced this kind of collaboration.

Two highlights from the STEM + Arts podcast series:

BTS Arts Integration Coach, Bob Smith Shares 1-Page SEEd Summary

Bob Smith, Alpine District arts coach, shares transformative stories about the arts during his interview. He shares how he advocates and supports teachers with easy-to-implement, hands-on resources and tools for teachers to integrate the arts with STEM.

Bob shares an important example about his experience coordinating with his science team about the new SEEd standards in Utah: “Many of the arts integrators who are doing amazing arts integrated projects were curious about the alignment. ‘Can I still do landforms with fourth grade?’ So I asked our science educator, “Break these down for me.” And she started breaking them down. I still kept thinking, Oh, this is like 100 pages of standards. So I kept working, breaking it down until I just had a one page summary of each grade’s science curriculum. I put the science standards side-by-side with that grade’s arts standards, so now teachers can see a clear summary of the big objectives of the SEEd and arts standards alignment.”

You can find Bob’s summary of the SEEd standards in the episode shownotes.

BTS Visual Arts Educator, Elicia Gray, Shares Bioluminescent Art project

The final episode of the STEM and Arts series captures three teachers participating in the Rocky Mountain STEM and Arts Think Tank, including BTS Visual Arts Educator Elicia Gray. Elicia shares how she helps students create a bioluminescent fish to adapt to the deep sea environs:

“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 attract mates or to defend themselves. The fish had all these really interesting, different reasons why they would light up. I had the students design their own bioluminescent fish that reflected one or more of those survival adaptations. The students got to decide what parts of the fish would light up. The students designed and painted their own fish. We painted with fluorescent things, fluorescent tempera paints, and anything that was fluorescent. We put them in a dark room and lit it with a black light, and it was bioluminescent! Just like it is in the deep sea.”

You can listen to the full six-episode series (or read the show notes) by clicking here or subscribing to the Artful Teaching Podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon, Spotify or Pandora.