Back to School With Beauty

How to teach with Beauty... and why you should!

It is that time of the year once more- school has begun. However, thanks to a global pandemic, it looks a little different than it did this time last year. Schools, teachers, and parents have all had to come up with creative approaches for learning that keep everyone safe and healthy. While we may have to deal with masks, social distancing, and hybrid classrooms, how students engage with learning has not changed. Now, more than ever, we need to incorporate beauty into our lesson plans, classrooms, and homes. Why? Because beauty reaches human persons in all times and spaces.

Beauty reaches human persons in all times and spaces.

How can beauty help us teach?

Beauty helps us to reach students because it enables us to access the human experience in a way people can easily understand. We listen to music all the time and people talk about songs that touched them. We see images on social media and people repost them because they saw something there that resonated with them as true. We may not always be able to put our finger on it, but human beings understand the language of beauty naturally.

When we experience beauty, we catch a glimpse of a deeper level of reality where we can look honestly at reality, ourselves, and God. My favorite example of this is a mathematical ordering concept called the Fibonacci sequence. (you can find some cool articles on it here and here.) Some plants produce leaves, seeds, or petals according to the sequence to pack as many as possible together while ensuring that each receives enough water or sunlight. The spiral pattern seen in the sunflower below is a result of the seeds growing according to this sequence. This is a beautiful pattern found in nature that invites us to stop and admire the thought behind the reality in front of us that can also teach us something, in this case, math.

The spiral pattern in the sunflower's seeds is a result of the seeds growing according to the golden ratio.

All these years after first learning about this concept in a high school math class, I still remember it because it is so beautiful. Recognizing the beauty and orderliness of nature led me to a deeper appreciation for the math behind it. When we teach using beauty, we can inspire our students to remember things they might not have otherwise because we gave them something tangible and beautiful to connect it to.

Practical ways to use beauty in the classroom

No matter what you teach- or where you teach it- you can use beauty to reach your students. So here are some practical tips to incorporate more beauty into your teaching.

• Use art to make your point- I teach 1st grade religious ed and middle school and high school sacrament prep and have had great success when I bring in pieces of art for my students to interpret. Looking at art gives them a visual reference to what we are talking about. They learn to interpret some of the symbolism in the piece and recognize it elsewhere. Art is a great way to open up the conversation into topics by asking questions about what is going on in the piece, who the people are, and why they think specific objects are there. Use your questions to guide your students to the conclusions you want them to draw.

• Interact with beauty- While this may be more difficult to do right now in a school setting, making a space where students can physically interact with beauty is a great way to teach. My first summer of grad school, one of my professors turned the class loose in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart for an hour, telling us to wander around, take notes about what we saw and what intrigued us, and, if we wanted, to sit with images that caught our attention. The point was to decipher what the building was saying and learn about the faith from the art present there. You can do this on a smaller scale in a few different ways. You can print out images and having students sit with one of their choosing. If possible, you can take an architecture walk and have students guess the functions of buildings by what they look like. You can take your students on either a real or virtual tour of an art museum or national park. You could go on a nature walk. There are so many ways you can interact with beauty!

• Give them beautiful words- If you have any choice, opt to study beautiful works of literature and poetry. Approach analysis as a search for meaning and help them connect it back to their own lives. Don't be afraid to ask deep questions!

• It's ok to cross disciplines- Introduce beauty in places your students might not expect it. You can connect things like math and music (music is an excellent way to teach fractions and music shows students a real- world application of mathematical concepts) and doing so will give your students a deeper appreciation of both disciplines and make learning fun!

• Encourage your students to express beauty- Hands- on learning is much more fun, so encourage your students to write their own poetry, paint their own masterpieces, make connections across disciplines, or write about a time when they experienced something beautiful.

I hope these ideas were helpful. Have you ever tried to introduce beauty in the classroom? What are some good ideas your students love? Share with us in the comments!

Want more ideas? Check out this post I wrote for the McGrath Institute blog!

https://mcgrathblog.nd.edu/the-importance-of-art-in-catechesis