photos by john kish iv
With Irish’s guidance, biochemistry majors Victoria Womer ’13 and Amaranth Kandallu ’13 used high-speed and high-definition camcorders to record erycine snakes like sand boas feeding on live mice. The team used computer software to analyze the films for statistical data about snout elevation, snout twisting, and maxillary depression, which Colleen Hait ’15 teaches students to make paper with helped them understand how her advisor Kristin Baxter. Hait and her co-leader the snakes use their snouts for Nicole Clark ’14 led a summer art camp for children. different activities like burlife experiences. Doing this enables children to rowing and feeding. challenge the status quo through art, which is exIrish is right on the mark actly what schoolchildren attending a government when she talks about the school in Raigarh, India, did with help from studio excitement of discovery; classart major Nokukhanya Langa ’13 and English and room lab exercises have preeducation major Melissa Marazas ’13. designed outcomes, but with “Society is so highly stratified by class and SOAR, anything can happen. color that few think there is anything of value in That’s what drew chemistry the rural areas,” says Langa. “What better way to major Sean Rossiter ’15 to a change minds than through the visual representaproject with Carl Salter, protion of children’s realities?” fessor of chemistry and former India isn’t the only place where art is disapdirector of SOAR, and chemispearing from schools. Back in Bethlehem, art edutry majors Caroline Bartulovcation majors Colleen Haitt ’15 and Nicole Clark ich ’15 and Gabrielle Sommer ’14 hosted a weeklong camp for 17 local children ’14. They expanded a previous in grades three through six, providing more art study of how temperature instruction than many students get in an entire and ionic strength influence year. “We had 40 hours of teaching experience in the reaction between iron and a week; we would have never been able to do that thiosulfate by determining the Amarnath Kandallu ’13 and Victoria Womer ’13 work with their during the school year,” says Clark, who hopes to subject on their project titled “Snout and Jaw Mobility in Sand different applications of the Boas: Balancing Conflicting Functional Constraints.” offer the camp again next summer. Ocean Optics dip probe, an Haitt agrees: “I learned so much about teaching. Having an instrument used in spectroscopy experiments. They concluded that actual class allowed me to test the lessons I had on paper in the real the dip probe allows for more varied experiments, as it goes to the world.” solution, rather than the solution having to be placed inside the “We conducted research in a deeper, more sustained way than we probe, as with an ordinary spectrometer. can in a regular classroom setting,” adds Baxter. “The positive effects “Doing original research is the ultimate application of learnof these projects reverberate throughout the world.” ing,” says Rossiter. “When we study the scientific method and Both of Baxter’s SOAR teams presented their work at the 2012 the principles of experimental design, they’re nearly worthless if Pennsylvania Art Education Association Conference held in Harriswe never get to apply them to solve a question to which we can’t burg in October and hope to present at the National Art Education simply look up the answer.” Association National Convention in Fort Worth, Texas, in March. Putting classroom theory into practice is one of the most valuTrue to its acronym, SOAR has propelled students to even greatable aspects of SOAR. For two teams of students working with er heights of curiosity. “I find myself asking ‘why’ more often and Kristin Baxter, assistant professor of art, classrooms of children wanting to prove things for myself instead of just taking someone’s became the laboratory to test the constructivist philosophy of art word for it,” says Bartulovich. W education, or grounding lesson plans and curricula in the child’s
FALL 2012
MORAVIAN COLLEGE MAGAZINE
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