As stated in an earlier post recommending PBS Student Reporting Labs-- and I cite the same source here-- discipline-based art education, or arts integration, is one of the more common approaches to art education (Bertling and Moore, 2021).
Arts integration was important to my undergraduate curriculum development course. Each project or lesson we designed in the class had an area of integration, but sometimes, that was a stronger influence than others. The quality of the connection relied on, partly, the quality of whatever interdisciplinary resource I was using. And one of the best resources I used was Annie Perkins’s blog, arbitrarilyclose.com. Perkins is a math teacher in Minneapolis, and her blog hosts a couple of interesting, thoughtful projects, both of which function as resources for teachers.
Perkins’s #MathArtChallenge was a result of the initial shutdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic. During lockdown, Perkins started doing daily posts with ideas and tutorials for math art activities, eventually reaching 101 activities, or “challenges”, by the end of summer 2021. Click here to explore her #MathArtChallenge posts. She explains the history, the structure and organization of the #MathArtChallenge, and its educational value, in a PDF that you can read here.
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| A geometric design I drew using one of Annie Perkins's #MathArtChallenge tutorials. |
With each post, Perkins provides clear step-by-step instructions, at least one video of her modeling the activity, and connections to the Common Core Standards for Mathematical Practice. One of the challenges that I followed along with was Day 21’s activity, Agra Fort Islamic Design, and you can see a picture of my attempt featured above. These posts could serve as springboards for project ideas, but they’re also thoughtfully designed tutorials for approachable math art activities.
However, a resource that can serve to inspire rich, meaningful projects with math integration can also be found on Perkins’s blog: the Mathematicians Project. Essentially, while most of the mathematicians taught in school are white men, a lot of her students aren’t, so she wanted to find role models in math that represented her students. She provides a more in-depth explanation of the project, as well as links to even more in-depth explanations of the project, here.
This list of mathematicians (which includes information on their respective fields and contributions to mathematics) and the thinking behind it, inspired an entire project, and the instruction plan, as well as the presentation I developed for it, is one of my favorite projects from my curriculum development course.
Make sure to check out my other Tutorials and Inspirations recommendations, and if you're a preservice or inservice art educator and you want to contribute to this blog, completing this survey should only take up 20-25 minutes of your day.
Bertling, J. G., & Moore, T. C. (2021). The U.S. K–12 Art Education Curricular Landscape: A Nationwide Survey. Studies in Art Education, 62(1), 23–46. https://doi.org/10.1080/00393541.2020.1858007
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