August 5, 2021
Beach Museum of Art director serves as mentor in NSF project
Linda Duke, director of the Kansas State University Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, was co-author of a paper presented by three Texas Tech University faculty members at the 128th Annual Conference of the American Society for Engineering Education. The conference was held virtually this year July 26-29. Read a description of the session.
Since 2017, Duke has served as a consultant on a National Science Foundation-sponsored project at Texas Tech University to create an experimental graduate curriculum for the environmental engineering program. The aim is to better support development of reflective decision-making in engineers who will face complex ecological and societal issues.
The project, led by a cross-disciplinary faculty team, has tapped the arts, including literature and visual arts, and used writing assignments and discussions. Duke’s role was to introduce faculty and graduate students to Visual Thinking Strategies, or VTS, and mentor their use of the protocols. VTS is a facilitated discussion technique that supports a group in examining and discussing a complex or ambiguous image, usually a work of art.
Duke made annual trips to the Lubbock campus for intensive workshops held at the Museum of Texas Tech University. She was invited because of her work over the past 20 years to apply the skill-building capacity of VTS to adult learning broadly, and particularly to the needs of scientists and others who deal with dense, complex information. VTS has been used to enhance the observation, critical thinking and communication skills of undergraduate and graduate students, as well as scientists, mathematicians, engineers and medical professionals.
Duke and other Beach Museum of Art staffers regularly collaborate with K-State researchers on projects that involve visual tools or visual knowledge.