Overview
How can we connect art to biology? Can we just draw a picture, write a poem or make a sculpture? Yes, not to imply that art is simple the discipline and skill to convey information through imagery is not to be under rated.; however, this is about exploration and the understanding that goes into the art project portion and will be developed from and rely heavily on the pre-project biology instruction. Too often we have students who ask us: why are we learning this, why is this important, and how will it help me in the future? It is good for students to have a growth mindset and always be looking into the future especially at the higher grade levels because the actuality of going to college is closing in every day. This will allow them to reflect less on the future and more on the immediate learning. This focus is necessary because the next task is going to be to do an art project that pertains to the biology lesson that was just taught. Students preparing for a project will always be more in tune with learning as they wish to prepare for a new experience that they have not previously considered. By producing something visible and tangible the immediate sense of accomplishment creates a positive outcome from the things they've learned, their sense of accomplishment rises and encourages them to engage quicker and more in depth the next time.
As scientists we at times get so focused on the data, we lose sight of the bigger picture of what we are studying. Having a moment of pause to reflect on what we are doing and remember, by taking that beat to look and listen as any good scientist should because not all data will be what you expect nor immediately evident. The students’ true revelations will come from experiencing what they did not know before they began to truly take the time that is needed. The goal of our work as educators is to draw attention to the existence of several typical attitudes toward form-related issues and to document the interactions between the theories that have emerged from them. The functional or synthetic, the formal or transcendental, and the materialistic or disintegrative are, in my opinion, the three primary currents of morphological philosophy. The first approach, and the evolution of evolutionary morphology has been significantly impacted by this way of thinking. The issue of the relationship between function and form serves as the primary battlefield for these two conflicting inclinations. Is form just the expression of function or activity, or is function the mechanical outcome of form? What is the fundamental structure or activity of life? The materialistic mindset is prevalent in almost every area of cognition and is not specifically biological. Its origins may be traced back to the Greek atomists, and many people now believe that materialism is the only viable scientific method due to the success of mechanical research in the 19th century. It is closer to the formal than the functional in biology.34
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