Agassiz's hands-on science teaching innovation

Anon, Grasshopper becomes human, Finland 1885

Louis Agassiz, in Lane Cooper, editor, Louis Agassiz as a Teacher: Illustrative Extracts on His Method of Instruction (Ithaca, NY: Comstock Publishing, 1945), p. 82—

In 1847 I gave an address at Newton, Massachusetts, before a Teachers' Institute conducted by Horace Mann. My subject was grasshoppers. I passed around a large jar of these insects, and made every teacher take one and hold it while I was speaking. If any one dropped the insect, I stopped till he picked it up. This was at that time a great innovation, and excited much laughter and derision. There can be no true progress in the teaching of natural science until such methods become general.

Versluis and Behrens working out the Iowa bugs

Iowa Insect Series, David Versluis and Roy R. Behrens

More than ten years ago (if you can believe it), my good friend and fellow designer David Versluis (we have both since retired from university teaching) decided to collaborate. Actually, he came up with a plan, and asked if I were up to it.

Over the years, he had amassed an assortment of (kaput) Iowa insects. His proposal was to scan those, at high resolution, and to send me the scans by email, one at a time. I had free rein. After receiving the scanned image, I had to alter it someway—major or minor—for the purpose of making a digital montage, using Adobe Photoshop. I would then send it back to him, and he in turn would make a move—and pass it back to me again.

We did this fairly rapidly, and after five or six back-and-forth sessions, we soon mutually came to suspect that the work was finished. The ones that I especially recall are a beetle, a cicada, a dragon fly, and a hornet (above, in a cropped version) that was eventually found to be not a hornet but a yellow jacket wasp. In a few short weeks we ended up with a substantial, original cluster, titled the Iowa Insect Series.

After finishing the series, it was David’s initiative to print them at large scale, and to be watchful of competitions or exhibitions which they could be submitted to. For almost a decade, they were exhibited multiple times (through his efforts) at various galleries and museums around the country. The most recent one that I recall was an exhibition last year at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, called Evolving Graphic Design.

However, I have just now learned from David that two of the pieces have recently been accepted for an upcoming exhibition—called Awake! Printmaking in Action, at the Ann Arbor Art Center in Michigan, which will run from April 14 through May 28, 2023.

Robert Frost, Georges De Mestral, and Velcro

In a video that we recently produced on the nature of the creative process (titled How to Win Kings and Influence Cabbages), we mentioned the invention of the fastener called Velcro by Swiss engineer Georges De Mestral, introduced in 1955. The legend of its origin is that the idea came to De Mestral as he was walking in the woods with his dog. 

When they returned home, De Menstral was at first dismayed by the efficiency with which burrs from burdock plants had become attached to his dog’s fur as well as to his clothing. Being an engineer, he made good of the situation. When he examined the plant burrs under a microscope, he discovered the ingenuity of their hook-and-loop effectiveness. Voila!

Since posting that film, we were pleased to run across a passage by American poet Robert Frost. He compares the process of literary innovation to the fortuitous attachment of burrs to ones clothing, while taking a walk—a wonderful concurrence with the experience of De Mestral. The excerpt follows.

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Robert Frost, “The Figure a Poem Makes” in Complete Poems. New York: Henry Holt, 1949—

[Scholars get their knowledge] with conscientious thoroughness along projected lines of logic; poets theirs cavalierly and as it happens in and out of books. They stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will stick to them like burrs where they walk in the fields…

monumental replicas / complex and complete

students at Peet Junior High School

Roy R. Behrens, "Looming Large: the outdoor megasculpture student projects of Bill Close" in The Iowa Source. Vol 40 No 1. January 2023, pp. 6-7—

In the spring of 1994, when I was in my 40s and had moved back to Iowa to teach, I was walking near a shopping mall and came within sight of a bicycle shop. There, propped up in front of the building, was a gigantic mountain bike, so large that it was taller than the building it stood beside. Even from a nearer view, it appeared to be an enormous, functioning bicycle, complex and complete in every detail. It was breathtaking and delightful, a flashback to my childhood days.

That enormous bicycle, as I soon found out, was a trompe l’oeil work of art, a “fool the eye” construction, like the large-scale sculptures of Swedish-born American artist Claes Oldenburg. As a pop artist, Oldenburg made monumental replicas of mundane familiar objects, such as bowling pins, binoculars, and a garden trowel. But the giant bicycle that I had suddenly come upon was not created by Oldenburg. The sculpture had been built from scratch as an art project by ninth-grade students at Peet Junior High School in Cedar Falls. The person who initiated the project and supervised the students was an art teacher named William F. (Bill) Close. more>>>

book cover

 

the notebooks of D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson

Image based on the plant photography of Karl Blossfeldt

D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, quoted in Ruth D'Arcy Thompson, D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, The Scholar-Naturalist (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), p . 175—

You choose some subject or other which takes your fancy, you buy a notebook and label it with the title of your theme; and you keep jotting down therein whatsoever bears upon your subject, as it comes your way, in all your reading, observation and reflection. I have had many such notebooks and some I have soon grown tired of but others have lasted and served me well ... Your subject opens out wonderfully as time goes on, it tempts you into byways, it carries you far afield; if you play the game aright it never comes to an end. It grows in interest continually, for things are interesting only in so far as they relate themselves to other things; only then can you put two and two together, and see them make four or even five, and hear them tell stories about each other. Such is science itself and such is all the knowledge that interests mankind.

Space Suit Design Booklet | Austin Montelius

Space Suit Booklet © Austin Montelius 2015

Above Last semester in the Department of Art at the University of Northern Iowa, students in a course about the history of modern design (graphic, industrial and architectural) were assigned a major end-of-term project. They chose a research subject from the widest range of possibilities, with the aim of producing a formal research paper, an illustrated booklet, an information graphic (such as a chronological chart), and so on. The results were impressive to say the least. Among the finest was an exactly written and designed 32-page booklet on "the evolution of space suits in fiction and reality," produced by senior graphic designer Austin Montelius. The printed cover is above, with one of the opening spreads below. It was both flawless and ambitious, an admirable achievement in every regard.

Space Suit Booklet spread © Austin Montelius 2015

 The history of space exploration is one of Austin's many interests. He is especially knowledgeable of the development of the Russian space program, which he used as the subject for a stunning chronological chart which he designed for an earlier studio class (see below).

Art History Poster | Turner Kopecky

Art History Poster © Turner Kopecky (2015)

Above Poster by Turner Kopecky, graphic design student, Department of Art, University of Northern Iowa (2015), announcing a Call for Papers for the 5th Annual Art History Symposium at the same school on April 10, 2015.

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Margaret Geller, interviewed in Joan Evelyn Ames, Mastery: Interviews with 30 Remarkable People. Portland OR: Rudra Press, 1997, p. 90—

When students ask me about training to be a scientist, I tell them to read broadly, not just in science. It's important because I believe that creativity really comes from a broad education. You can be technically skilled, but the ability to make connections requires borrowing and reformulating ideas from other places.