Integrative Learning
Why would a center for teaching and learning sponsor a ceramic art exhibit?
Where the Seafloor Melts is an exhibit about integrative thinking. Joan Lederman’s art inhabits a boundary space between art and science – literally, in that her materials come from scientific research. But both art and artist inhabit this boundary space: as method, as a way of thinking.
The exhibit in the gallery spirals out into multiple other expressions: in multimedia, in conversations with faculty and students, in almost two years of cross-conversations about art and science, boundaries and connections, adaptive expertise and contingency thinking. The exhibit itself is an experiment, an enactment of a series of engagements around learning and integration. These are values embedded in Joan Lederman’s work; these are values embedded in the work of the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS).
Learning is rarely routine or procedural; learning is usually messy. The kinds of expertise that we need to cultivate for this century require learning environments filled with uncertainty, where students learn to “think fractally” and to work outside their comfort zone. In Where the Seafloor Melts, we can see all the trace elements of learning and chance and fractal thinking in the same way that we can look into a single piece of Joan Lederman’s work and see all the layered millennia and terrestial processes that brought mud and fire and water to a new material existence. -Randy Bass, CNDLS