Art museum educators are always looking for ways to connect visitors with their museums and the art they house. Integrating math into museum activities turned out to be one way of sparking those connections.
The InterGenerational ArtMath at the Museum (IGAMM) project brought together 15 grandparents and their 27 grandchildren, art museum education curators, and me, a TERC researcher, to explore the connections between math and art at the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia. The project consisted of six intergenerational sessions that promoted looking closely at the art by integrating math into art museum activities. These educational activities spanned different formats typical at art museums, such as family events, gallery activities, self-directed tours, guided tours, and classroom activities.
IGAMM activities were developed in a couple of ways. Sometimes, they evolved through the education curators and me visiting the galleries and talking about the math connections that we could see in the art. We then brainstormed about what kind of materials and activities would engage visitors in using those connections. For example, when the museum had a temporary exhibition of Gio Ponti’s art, his use of patterns and geometric shapes offered a perfect math conversation piece in guided tours (Figure 1).
They also helped spark grandparents’ and grandchildren’s creativity when working on tissue collages (Figure 2).
Other times, we started from the educational materials and then thought about what artwork might connect well with them. For instance, when I brought pattern blocks in for consideration, the education curators immediately thought that working with them would be a great gallery activity and were excited to find that their decorative arts collection had two chairs with a beautiful blue and red pattern that was aperfect connection with the pattern blocks (Figure 3 and Figure 7). This idea turned into a gallery activity during a family day that directed visitors to find patterns on the chairs, observe what repeated and what changed, identify shapes, and create their own patterns using the blocks.
This article examines the main takeaways from two conversations that I had with the art museum’s education curators, who I will call Aspen and Fern. The first conversation, at the end of the program, involved reflecting on finishing the project. The second conversation, which took place two years later, involved a discussion of the lessons learned that they had integrated into their ongoing practice.
The education curators explained that one of the main goals for bringing math into the art museum was for it to act as a bridge to help visitors make connections between the art and what they know from outside the museum. Aspen explained that, in one of the events, she observed a boy using pattern blocks to create patterns (Figure 4). She noted:
[I was] thinking about [this boy] and his connection to that part of the [pattern blocks] project and how for him that kind of math connection, breaking it down in that way can help bridge that gap. If you sit them down in front of a work of art and ask them what they think it means right off the bat, then that’s a little bit harder of a leap. But if you can scaffold that by bringing in these other things that they’re already familiar with, that are easier for them to connect to because of what they’re learning in school, then that can help get them started.
Math contributed to the education curators’ goal of building visitors’ visual and museum literacy by encouraging them to look closer at the art and feel comfortable in a museum.
The education curators pointed out that the processes involved in art are similar to those involved in STEM, such as observation, experimentation, and adjusting according to results (Figure 5). Fern observed:
The same way that scientists would conduct an experiment—you come in with this idea, you run some trials, maybe things don’t work out exactly how you want, and you adjust and create new hypotheses based on your new data—it’s an interesting way to think about the creative process and the scientific method, and how those two are related. So, that’s been something that we’ve been thinking a lot about and had a lot of fun with creating programming.
For Aspen and Fern, IGAMM was an opportunity to test ideas and consider how the artistic and scientific processes could be integrated in activities and to fine-tune those activities by trying them with different groups. They noted that it is hard to find activities that work for different ages and that can be tied into multiple exhibitions, so IGAMM events were great opportunities to test activities. Aspen explained that using tissue collage tiles (Figure 6):
. . . was a great project. . . . It’s not always easy to find projects that can be adapted and can be used by lots of different ages, and everyone enjoys, and that can . . . be adjusted . . . but the result is still satisfying, even if it’s a three-year-old just dumping colors on there, and it still looks good. And it can be inspired by a lot of different exhibitions that can tie into this art activity.
Fern and Aspen also found that teachers currently ask for more interdisciplinary connections in museum activities in order tojustify trips to the art museum with their class. Teachers need to demonstrate to their principals that children are working on education standards while at the museum; the IGAMM activities were an ideal way to accomplish these interdisciplinary goals.
Fern, Aspen, and I agreed that it was challenging to bring together the goals of museum educators and researchers. Conducting research as initially planned would have been disruptive for Fern and Aspen. Given that the intention of the program was to integrate math as seamlessly as possible into museum activities, we found ways to make things work, but tensions occasionally arose. For example, from the museum educators’ perspective, to design activities for the art museum that insert math, one needs to start from the work of art, not from a math concept on which one may want to focus. They felt that trying to impose a math idea on an art piece is artificial. Aspen explained:
That was the biggest challenge for me: how to find works of art that we can bring in the math or STEM connection and have it really be integrated in a way that is meaningful and satisfying for the people participating in it and ultimately helps people connect to the art. Because, for us, it’s object-based, we’re all about [working] off the work of art.
Another challenge was my interest in observing learning. Fern and Aspen considered trying to observe learning to be a traditional or school-like understanding of learning. The kind of learning happening in a museum, however, is related to engagement and making connections, which are not easily observable. This meant that some research activities, such as using a rubric to observe activities, were experienced as disruptive by Fern and Aspen. The lesson for me was that rubric data did not help understand museum learning, so the project would have benefited from a more authentically museum-based understanding of learning.
Other challenges were related to the nature of work in an art museum. As we considered activities for IGAMM, I learned that one needs to carefully consider where materials will be used, such as the galleries or a classroom. Materials for gallery activities need to be safe for the artwork. Materials that could destroy the artwork—such as paint and scissors—can only be used in classrooms. I also learned that there is some unpredictability in what art is going to be in the galleries, even when it is part of the permanent collection. Art can be removed from galleries at any point for a variety of reasons, such as being loaned out or being restored. Thus, museum educators need to be ready to pivot at any point.
After the project concluded, Aspen and Fern have continued using IGAMM activities and have found other opportunities to bring STEM content to the museum, including bringing together scientists and artists to the museum for a conversation on the ways their work overlaps.
Dr. Nuria Jaumot-Pascual is a Research Scientist at TERC. She currently co-leads four National Science Foundation–funded projects, which include: Native STEM Portraits, a longitudinal study of the experiences of Native students and professionals in STEM; the Institute for Meta-Synthesis, aproject that has developed a series of modules to teach qualitative meta-synthesis methods to scholars focusing on equity in STEM; African American Young Women in Making to Engage in STEM and Entrepreneurship (AAMASE), a project that engages middle-and high-school African American girls through participatory design research in making and entrepreneurship activities emphasizing STEM disciplinary practices; and Afterschool Making Projects with Design Thinking and Mathematics with Latinx Communities (AMPD4Math), a project that engages middle-school Latinx youth through afterschool making projects emphasizing math and community. She is also co-PI for the Leveraging the AISES Archival Database study funded by the Spencer Foundation. Dr. Jaumot-Pascual is a member of the research advisory board for the ADVANCE Resource and Coordination (ARC) Network and holds a doctorate in Qualitative Research and Evaluation Methodologies from the University of Georgia.
I want to thank the grandparents and grandchildren who participated in the project, the education curators at the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia, and the Grandparents Raising Grandchildren Program at the Athens Community Council on Aging for their patience and cheerful engagement with this project. I also want to thank the Education Research Collaborative (ERC) at TERC for the generous funding for this project.