Artwork by Camila Pizano
This summer, Jennifer Powers, a professor in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology, Charlie Willis, a teaching associate professor in the Department of Biology Teaching and Learning, and their colleague, Camila Pizano, an assistant professor at the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago, hosted a half-day online symposium about integrating art into biology courses.
More than 70 participants attended “Mutualism: Art + Biology: Enhancing learning in University courses.” The participants, ranging from graduate students to full professors, tuned in from 10 countries representing more than 20 different institutions. Powers and Willis share a bit about their motivation for organizing the event and what they hope people take away from the experience.
What inspired you to develop this symposium?
Willis: The symposium really grew out of an ongoing conversation Jennifer and I have been having for years. We’ve both used art as a learning tool in our respective classes and have seen firsthand the benefits. I teach a freshman seminar in the spring on the art and science of natural history, and Jennifer guest lectures on nature journaling. During those classes, Jennifer and I kept coming back to the question: What more could we do, beyond our own classrooms, to build on this idea that art can be such a powerful way to learn biology? After years of tossing ideas back and forth, we realized — there was nothing actually stopping us. So, we decided to go for it.
Powers: We partnered with Dr. Camila Pizano, who was then at Lake Forest College and now at the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago. As a person with training in both art and science, Camila added a unique perspective to our team. We committed to creating this symposium as a way to not only explore the intersection of art, biology, and education, but to start building a broader community of people who care about it.
How did you get interested in this intersection between art and biology as a teaching tool?
Willis: I’ll start by saying I’m not an artist, or rather, my interest didn’t stem from a background in art. My interest comes from my love of natural history and the history of biology. For most of this history, people studying the natural world communicated their discoveries through illustrations and paintings. From this, I worked with my mom, Ann Willis, who is an artist and educator, to integrate art into some of the activities I was doing in my courses. Later, looking at modern research, I found that practices like drawing and painting have been shown to boost learning and engagement. Those two ideas clicked for me as a way to engage my mostly non-major students, many of whom come in feeling unsure about their abilities as scientists. Bringing art into the class offers them a different, and often more inviting, way to think and learn. And it’s just built from there.
Powers: I became interested in nature journaling during the pandemic as a practice to connect me to the nature in my backyard, as I couldn’t travel for work. I took a two-day workshop through the Wild Wonder Foundation that was aimed at training people on how to teach nature journaling. Over 200 people participated in that training session. I learned a lot from that experience, but I also noticed that I was basically the only person representing higher education. It’s such a powerful tool for learning, and that is why I would really like to see this percolate into university classes.
What do you hope they took away from the experience?
Willis: I hope one of the main things people walked away with is the sense that there’s a larger community of people interested in using art to teach biology — that we are not alone! And I hope that this community inspires them to try using art in their own biology classrooms.
Powers: Another hope for the session is to emphasize that art-science integration in higher education classrooms can exist along a continuum, from a few integrative assignments in a largely disciplinary course to a fully integrated course that is co-taught by faculty from art and science departments. There is no “one-size-fits-all” approach.
Explore the subject in more depth.