Following the return of our feedback, after we submitted our RMA Checklist, we had a lot of revisions to complete before we were ready to submit our new rough draft with the edits requested of us.

Looking back on our theme trying to connect art and science we realized that many of the pieces that we had chosen for our initial list did not entirely support what we were trying to accomplish by focusing on the connection between STEM and visual art. We were aiming to make an interdisciplinary bridge between fields, giving teachers access for more resources to engage students in learning topics by connecting what they were covering in science or math courses to classes that focused on the creative elements of learning and thinking.

For many of the initial pieces that we selected in our teaching portfolio, we focused on the idea of the “Natural Form” and the idea that Anatomy or representations of anatomy had changed over time as artists stepped away from the anatomical exploration that is so well-known in the Renaissance. We instead decided to look at how artists have utilized their own interests in Science, Engineering, and Math to view the world; merging the technical and scientific with the whimsical and the artistic.

To do this, we went through our artists and the online Rollins collections, looking for artists who had a background or were inspired by science when creating their pieces. Then, we re-evaluated the selections we had, and removed those pieces we thought didn’t match the theme as closely as we had initially wanted. From there, we selected one of the already published Teaching Portfolios and modeled our rough draft in that format, using Google Slides to create the presentation below:

One of the most difficult sections for our rough draft was figuring out how to create the questions and keywords that needed to be associated with each piece. While there were descriptions by each piece that we selected from the Rollins Collections, many of the pieces called for additional research on the background of the artist, their influences and their basic biographical information.

We also spent a significant amount of time going back over the curriculum standards, which we had been encouraged to expand. When originally planning to go through the standards it was just another tool for us to reinforce how useful we thought our teaching portfolio would be, which for the Science standards was difficult since Science sources tend to step away from survey knowledge into focused topics after 5th grade, we have now added Science and Visual Arts standards for K-12.

While this is still a rough draft, we hope that this project is a lot closer to the final version of this project and that we have managed to create a useful tool that teachers can bring into their classrooms, whether they be visual arts or STEM lessons.