WPU Practicum Teacher Creates Two Excellent STEAM Lessons for High School

Recently WPU Practicum Student Katherine Machere created two fascinating as well as rigorous STEAM art lessons in her WPU practicum placement with high school students at SOIT in Paterson, NJ.  
Ms. Machere is a pre-service art education student at WPU, as well as a fine arts major with a sculpture concentration. Her expertise in sculpture-making using plaster bandages greatly facilitated her ability to teach these lessons with great success. 

Ms. Machere is also currently enrolled in Professor Triada Samaras' "Art Methods for K-12 Teaching" course at WPU.  This course teaches pre-service K-12 art teachers how to create and implement lesson plans for the classroom. In this course Professor Samaras, who is also a WPU STEAM Art Professor in Residence at SOIT, emphasizes the creation of STEAM art and arts integration lessons. Thus Ms. Machere made a seamless transition to a Geraldine R. Dodge funded STEAM school in Paterson. In these schools, arts integration into other content areas such as math and science is a natural occurrence, yet neither the creativity and/or self-expression of art-making are lost for the students. In addition, Ms. Machere and Ms. Samaras have spent many afternoons together in the classroom at SOIT brainstorming with art teacher, Marilyn Simon, a long term veteran at SOIT and an expert art teacher.  Machere's lesson plans grew out of this general context.  Her first lesson, hand sculpture, featured a blend of art, science, and engineering and was inspired by the ideas of autobiography and identity.  

In this lesson Ms. Machere initially asked the students, "How might you be able to express an aspect of your autobiography without words but using only visual means?" SOIT high school students pondered this question and an ensuing discussion followed about individual identity and expression for these high schoolers. Next, Ms Machere presented visual images of hand gestures and students pondered the use of them as a visual communication and to express meaning.  Students examined the art work of artist, George Segal, who works with plaster bandages and uses a simple visual language to explore aspects of humanity.

From this point, students were ready to brainstorm their own ideas for communicating with this medium.  Students selected a gesture they wished to represent.  Ms. Machere did a demo with the plaster bandages to explain how students could use this material to achieve their desired ends. Students worked in pairs with great enthusiasm, getting used to the engineering and science problems inherent in this art medium.  As the plaster medium only took 15 minutes to dry students had the satisfaction of seeing quick results!  After the hand sculptures were dry students sanded them and mounted them onto small blocks of wood Ms. Machere brought to the classroom.

Next, Ms. Machere asked the students, "What colors and/or textures could you use to further communicate your meaning to the viewer?" She urged students to "think outside the box" and to experiment with a wide variety of colors and painting techniques. She also encouraged them to use "mixed media" on their hand sculptures. Students relished the opportunity to paint and collage their plaster hand sculptures and a wide variety of solutions emerged.

This hand sculpture lesson was a true STEAM and arts integration one, with the high school students able to simultaneously increase their knowledge about art, science, engineering and meaning-making in this activity.

On another day in the SOIT classroom, Ms. Machere posed more intriguing questions to the high school SOIT art students: "What does a city look like visually? What are the visual forms shapes lines etc that help the viewer know they are looking at a city?" she asked them.  Students pondered and discussed the shapes, and forms inherent in the urban environment considering the math and engineering aspects of the city, as well as its physical characteristics.  Students brainstormed collaboratively to plan their structures for the city.  Ms. Machere demonstrated how to piece together recycling materials to create an armature for the plaster wrapping bandages.  In this lesson, she also gave them a time limit challenging their ability to create under a time constraint. Students were eager to use their newly acquired plaster bandage wrapping techniques and creative process on this new problem!  The results delighted them as well as Ms. Machere, Mrs. Simon, and Ms. Samaras!  This was another fine example of a STEAM lesson in the high school art classroom.

 
As a Fine Arts major with an emphasis in sculpture, Ms. Machere recently presented her final art works in the Power Arts Gallery at WPU for her Senior Thesis and BFA degree. Machere's work is a perfect example of a STEAM project, seamlessly integrating aspects of science, technology, engineering, art and math. In her written paper, Machere explains her fascination with sunflowers that led to her interest in the mathematical fibonacci sequence. Fibonacci numbers often appear unexpectedly in mathematics as well as science such as as sunflowers. Machere explains the "sunflower is unique because it is the only flower whose seeds grow in the fibonacci spiral formation".  This fascinating fact forms the basis of Machere's artistic explorations for her Senior Thesis.

Machere cites her WPU Practicum teaching experience at the School of Information Technology in Paterson, NJ, and her work with Professor Triada Samaras, Dodge funded STEAM PIR at Eastside, and Machere's K-12 Art Methods professor and supervisor at WPU, as inspirational to her work.  She describes how difficult it was for her to create the fiberglass molds for her large wall sculpture (see below) and how hard it was to figure out the correct electrical wiring for it so that the lights would slowly form into a fibonacci spiral.  Her use of scientific research and trial and error were key. She notes, "I find that I have done the most learning in my life by experimenting and finding that most problems in life do have more than one answer".  She links this learning process to the "10 Lessons the Arts Teach" by Dr. Elliot Eisner she learned about in Professor Samaras' Art Methods class. As a future K-12 art teacher, Machere states confidently that she will, "bring this same philosophy to my future art classroom". Bravo Ms. Machere!

 

Click the arrow above to see this remarkable Machere STEAM art sculpture "live"