Liberal arts and science profs collaborate on unique learning community in the desert

Can you learn more by looking up at the clouds in the Texas desert than by looking at a smartboard in an enclosed classroom? Absolutely! answer professors in the College of Arts & Sciences who have developed an interdisciplinary course that teaches basic science and arts concepts through a 10-day "learning community" experience in the Southwest.

 

Following their successful launch of the new ecology travel course in the 2010 Maymester, the five professors who collaborated to create the desert learning community have been selected by the International Society for Exploring Teaching and Learning (ISETL) to make a presentation on their innovative project at the society’s annual conference in the fall.

 

ISETL is a society that encourages university faculty from all disciplines to develop learner-centered principles of teaching and learning carried out in innovative, yet effective and practical ways. The desert learning community course certainly fits the bill as the overall goal is to emphasize the interaction between science and the arts.

 

Matt Hearn and Wayne Garrett of the English department, Jon Lowrance and Kent Gallaher of the biology department and Cliff Eanes-Tierney of the art department worked together to create the course and the abstract to present at the ISETL conference, “Teaching Nature: A Model for the Integration of Science, Art and Literature.”

 

The eight enrolled students traveled to the Guadalupe Mountains and Big Bend National Park in west Texas. While students carried out scientific observations and field work in the desert, they also did daily journaling, read various works of nature literature and created artistic representations as part of the emphasis on how the arts and sciences actually enhance one another, rather than existing in completely separate realms.

 

“We want them to learn that all these barriers between academic disciplines are man-made,” said Gallaher, professor of biology and chair of the department. “If you look back historically at how knowledge was acquired, there were no barriers between artwork and science. Look at John Muir. If we have an understanding of art, it helps us understand science better, and understanding science helps understand literature better.”

 

The journey to a multi-discipline learning community took some years, Gallaher said. About 12 years ago, Lipscomb’s biology department began offering Maymester travel experiences with alternating locations: coastal Florida, Washington state and arid lands in Texas and New Mexico.

 

About eight years ago, Hearn, Garrett and Gallaher teamed up to provide a nature literature component to the ecology travel trips, allowing science students – who are often reluctant to delve into the world of arts – an opportunity to earn their liberal arts credits in an atmosphere less intimidating to them.

Students were required to enroll in their choice of two of the three courses offered: The journal as art, desert literature or the ecology of arid lands. All students read desert literature, art and ecology textbooks, but each class had a different final project. Before leaving for the desert, students met on campus to learn the chemistry of the desert and went to Radnor Lake to practice field drawings, said Jackson Hearn, one of the eight students who enrolled.

 

The participants camped in tents, spent a few nights within yards of the Rio Grande, visited the Donald Judd Foundation (a museum of the minimalist artist’s works) in Marfa, Texas, and spent an evening with Texas artist and author Acree Carlisle, who told them stories of the Comanche wars as the sun was setting.

 

“One night in our camp we could heard a cow bell, and then we heard the Mexican cowboys come across the river to gather the cows. It’s really empty out there,” said Jackson Hearn.

 

Hearn, a sophomore from Nashville, said he was attracted to the arid lands trip because the terrain is so different from anything he sees in his home. “It’s a good opportunity to start understanding experiences that are very different from my normal experience,” he said.

 

The entire learning approach was different from the norm, he said. By throwing out the barriers between scientific and artistic learning, he found “another way to accurately portray reality,” he said. “By combining the disciplines, you are creating a more faithful picture of what (the object of study) is like.”