Giving Compass' Take:

· Education Dive relays topics of conversation from day one of the Arts Education Partnership conference, including a call for more research into the academic benefits of arts education.

· What are the noted benefits of arts education? How does arts education affect the way students view the world? How does it widen their perspectives?

· Here's more on research into the effects of arts education.

The role of the arts in STEM and examining data from "arts-rich" schools were among highlights during day one of the Arts Education Partnership conference.

When Nettrice Gaskins was teaching at the Boston Arts Academy, she was asked to teach an Advanced Placement computer science course. But she was at the school to run a new STEAM lab, blending the arts into science, technology, engineering and math instruction.

So she pitched the idea of teaching an arts-based computer science course to The College Board, and they agreed. The unique approach led to students composing music to data and a student creating a video on the connections between jazz improvisation and quantum physics — specifically the work of John Coltrane.

“They were all trying to apply their practice to that particular unit in ways that I hadn’t thought of myself,” Gaskins said Wednesday during a morning session at this year’s gathering of the Arts Education Partnership (AEP). "Students should be able to follow into music even though they are doing data analysis.”

Now the content manager for the Fab Foundation and an adjunct at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Gaskins shared her approach to starting with aspects of culture when designing lessons and activities for students. Inspired by the culture of Bhutan, for example, she described connections between the importance of sewing among Bhutanese people and the principles involved in fabrication, such as 3D printing.

In addition, it’s the “lived experiences of students” that separate STEAM from arts integration, added Marvin Carr, a senior advisor for STEM and community relations with the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Dancers, for example, bring a useful perspective to the field of robotics because of their understanding of how the body moves. And the “camaraderie that comes with music” is the same type of collaboration that is needed in an engineering lab, he said.

Read the full article about arts education by Linda Jacobson at Education Dive.