Checkpoint Leonardo – combining informal science and art education to primary and science teacher education

Both artists and scientists want to make the invisible world visible. Checkpoint Leonardo (CPL) is a project for teaching and learning the art and science ways to gain knowledge of the world in informal museum and school education simultaneously. It consists of a series of art exhibitions with tailored workshops based on the scientific and artistic perspectives of the exhibit artworks. The first four workshops were designed and instructed for the conceptual level of 6th grade pupils by interdisciplinary groups of physics student teachers and elementary school student teachers. These workshops studied different ways of perceiving (related to cubism), infrared imaging, oxidation as a source of color, and acid-base indicators. The basis for all workshops was to use the techniques and represent the results in an aesthetic manner. As the work continues and accumulates, the representations combine into an artistic project as well as a scientific body of results. This project was a volunteer part of pedagogical studies covering courses of pedagogy of arts and science and it was co-instructed by lecturers of pedagogy of science, art and museum pedagogies at the University of Jyväskylä and Jyväskylä Art museum, and the regional artist group Live Herring. Also, a series of lectures in the theme of different ways of perceiving the world was included in the Checkpoint Leonardo project. During the project we acquired and analyzed essays on students’ ideas of nature of science and aesthetic and empirical ways of knowing world and their development in this project. Only 41% of the student teachers mentioned the empirical nature of scientific knowledge prior the project and 16% of them claimed that scientific process does not permeate creativity.