Tiffany Navarro and Art as Education

Tiffany Navarro is an art educator and a huge advocate for combining art and science in lessons for children.  Currently she is writing a STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics) based curriculum for middle school children in Mexico. Here she describes three of the projects she’s worked on with her 9-12 year-old sculpture class. 

In her first project each student picked an organ from a book and proceeded to make it with a newspaper technique. In the next the students made jellyfish, and in the final one students developed their own machine to fix a problem in the world. This image above, the Snot Not Bot, is meant to suck up all the snot in the air and then cleans it and releases it. As Navarro describes her curriculum,

“My goal for combining art and science was to teach my students that art and science are not that different and in fact go well together.  In the beginning of the lessons I mentioned that both artists and scientists: ask questions, solve-problems, research, use creativity and observe.  I explained that art and science go well together because scientists use many art techniques when researching and artists research to complete their art.”

Yay for art and science in the classroom! Keep up the great work Tiffany!