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Qatar Foundation

Innovations in Education: the Art and Science Partnership
2004, Doha, Qatar
Conference website: http://www.qf.org.qa.

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University

mosher@svsu.edu

The Innovations in Education conference was held in October 2003 in Doha, Qatar, where several universities from the United States have instituted satellite campuses or programs in Doha’s Education City. The Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development has now published the papers presented there. The conference began with a welcome from co-organizer Her Highness Sheika Mozah Bint Nasser Al Missned, the Chairperson of the Quatar Foundation, who then turned the floor over to her co-organizer, Harriet Mayor Fulbright, Chair of the International Child Art Foundation and Editor of ChildArt magazine. Fulbright drew upon her experience in English language teaching in several international settings that relied upon the arts--song, dance, photographs––to make words and phrases most memorable to children. She affirmed how, by making artworks, students' risk-taking leads them to a better sense of self, identity and community. Once the child artists have envisioned and built something tangible, something that they can see, its effects are positive on all aspects of their classroom work. Eldon Katter, editor of School Arts magazine, delivered a well-honed list that answers any doubters' questions "What Do the Arts Do Best?" Steve Seidel documented the Harvard School of Education's Project Zero, where Howard Gardner developed a theory of our multiple intelligences that come into play in any milieu where problem solving is valued.

Alluding to the diverse works of Leonardo and the optics of Newton, Judith M. Burton limned the interdependence of the arts and sciences, and students' need for mastery of two symbol systems of equal importance. She called for a true partnership, not one that leaves the arts as poor handmaidens in service to a scientific pedagogy. Leonardo Reviews contributor, Amy Ione, explored fellow artist M.C. Escher and the impact upon him of his visit to the Alhambra in 1936. The experience, reinforced when he read a paper by mathematician George Polyna, led Escher to explore tesselations in the subsequent four decades of his artistic career. Escher's artwork subsequently inspired mathematician Sir Roger Penrose, crystallographer A.V. Shubnikov, chemist Nadrian C. Seemen, and legions of secondary school math (Mrs. Koen at my high school!) and art teachers too numerous to count.

The conference attendee––and now reader––is given a model program for arts integrated into the teaching of science developed by the Arts Council of Richmond Virginia. Two papers on the East Carolina University Art and Math Project, include examples of student artwork in their curriculum that begins with Locating Points, and Symmetry, and moves through Computer Skills (kids doing simple programming, always an accomplishment) to Tesselations, Perspective, and Topology. The curriculum of "Art, Biology &Investigation" discussed by B. Stephen Carpenter II is illustrated with a cluttered screenshot of a hypertext version of his research. While its breadth and linkage is clearly well-served by hypermedia, it would have been more valuable to this volume if its several diagrams were each shown individually in readable form, rather than solely in this pile-up. Carpenter's essay demonstrates much, but the unfortunate graphic only says Yep, you sure can have lots o’ windows open on a computer screen.

Dartmouth College professor Petr Janata's "Music and Neuroscience" shows demonstrable results of music upon brain functioning, while Gordon L. Shaw found a "Music Math Causal Connection". The author of Keeping Mozart in Mind calls for the fundamental rethinking math and science education for young children. Wait a minute, weren't music and mathematics linked in the schooling of classical Greece? And Renaissance Italy? Shaw is also an advocate of the design of educational video games, and asks us to call them exactly that, despite parental and administrative prejudices against the medium.

One is heartened to see this educational research and reporting coalescing in a conference in the Middle East, from whence it is always nice to receive good news. May Arab nations––and all nations, including my United States––invest in education and creativity, rather than war and political repression. May the Qatar Foundation continue to support valuable work, scholarly communication and publication.

 

 




Updated 1st August 2005


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