Project Overview

The Gallagher-Bluedorn Performing Arts Center at the University of Northern Iowa responded to a call for proposals from the Iowa Mathematics and Science Education Partnership in its efforts to prepare more high-quality mathematics and science teachers for Iowa’s schools. The project focused primarily on offering a series of interactive professional development workshops for teachers within the Waterloo Community School Districts and pre-service teachers at the University of Northern Iowa during the 2008-2009 and 2009-2010 school year.

The project, Learning Math and Science Through the Arts (LMSTA), was an enhancement of an existing project of the Gallagher-Bluedorn Performing Arts Center, Waterloo Community School District, and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Teaching artists trained by the Kennedy Center led a three-hour participatory math and science workshops for in-service and pre-service teachers and also conducted demonstrative lessons for UNI education classes and grade 1-8 classrooms. These classroom demonstrations included movement exercises to learn the water cycle, systems of the human body, and the rainforest.

The Partners in Education program at the Kennedy Center focuses on the professional development of classroom teachers by offering interactive workshops that focus on teaching in and through the arts, by integrating an art form with a curriculum area. The Kennedy Center model includes:

• Instruction involving students in active learning by drawing on students’ multiple intelligences and various learning styles.
• Each lesson containing identifiable objectives and is linked to national and/or state standards of learning. Objectives identify what students will know, be able to do, and appreciate in each discipline
• Arts-integrated instruction involves active students; they observe and respond, imagine, analyze, hypothesize, create, reflect, revise, evaluate, and revise again.

Today’s students need to be prepared to think creatively and be able to exercise intellectual curiosity, traits much needed for tomorrow’s workforce. According to Daniel Pink, “The future belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind: artists, inventors, storytellers-creative and holistic "right-brain" thinkers whose abilities mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who doesn't.”

While learning in and through the arts, participants master learning objectives in both the subject area and the art form. The learning activities focus on participatory strategies and are based on national, state, and local standards in the arts and other content areas.