Gemma Anderson-Tempini
Interdisciplinary methods, Artistic research and Public Art
Anderson-Tempini will talk about her collaboration with mathematicians and biologists, investigating the role of drawing in higher dimensional geometry and biological processes, that led to a large public art commission in 2023.
Born in 1981 in Belfast, Gemma Anderson-Tempini graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2007. She completed a practice-based PhD studentship at the University of the Arts London and University College Falmouth in 2015 and has been a Leverhulme Trust Artist in Residence at Imperial College London. In 2016 she won an AHRC award for the art/science/philosophy project ‘Representing Biology as Process’ with philosopher John Dupre and cell biologist James Wakefield (2017-2021) at the University of Exeter. In 2023 she completed the Artangel and Leeds 2023 commission ‘And She Built a Crooked House’. She has published two peer review books with Intellect Press ‘Drawing as a Way of Knowing in Art and Science’ (2017) and ‘Drawing Processes of Life’ (2023).
Shaaron Ainsworth
Drawing to learn, teach and assess in science
Of course, artists and architects draw. But, to some it is more surprising to find that drawing is also a fundamentally important scientific practice. Accordingly, there is increasing interest in asking learners to draw visual representations for themselves. When learners pick up a pencil and paper or move a stylus on a screen, they can enhance their understanding. In this talk, I argue that new knowledge emerges when students draw, as expressing what they currently know in external form recruits cultural, cognitive, and sensory-motor resources that develop their own and others' understanding. Unsurprisingly, therefore we can draw to learn for many purposes: we draw to prepare, to observe, to remember, to understand and to communicate including teaching and assessment. In this talk, I illustrate these purposes using drawings from diverse domains and age groups to consider what successful drawing to learn in science looks like and what support learners might need. I will also consider several open questions, such as whether everyone can draw to learn and if there are certain situations where we should avoid drawing diagrams.
Shaaron Ainsworth is a Professor of Learning Sciences in the School of Education at the University of Nottingham. Her background is in Psychology, Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science.
Her research aims to understand the cognitive, social and affective processes than underpin effective learning and use that to design innovative educational experiences (on and off-line). A particular focus is studying learning with representations such as diagrams, animations, multimedia and gestures and she is particularly focussed on how we learn when we combine and construct these representations.
She works in preschool, primary, secondary and adult education in both formal and informal settings. She has written over 100 chapters and papers in this area and supervised over 25 PhD students with similar interests.
