Can Studying Art Help a Student Be a Better Doctor?

You may read in the Bulletin this week that our Fifth Graders are working in metal in art class with T. Diane to make Mexican tin suns inspired by Aztec Sun Calendars.  They are doing this in preparation for our annual Dia de los Muertos celebration on October 31.  (That’s “Day of the Dead” in Spanish.)  Besides being part of a multi-sensory integration of our Spanish, Social Studies and Art curricula, and I’ll bet T. Joseph will work in Math as well before we get to the actual celebration, why might this be important to your child’s future?

According to Dr. Gary Christenson, President of the Society for the Arts in Healthcare, medical students with visual arts training demonstrated improved observational skills.  In a 2001 study, medical students who participated in forms of visual arts training, such as life drawing and art observation exercises, showed stronger visual diagnostic skills than those with no arts training.  In short, they had sharper powers of observation and were more likely to pick up visual cues that helped them diagnose a patient.  They looked at things more closely.  Studying art is not just to explore a possible career in the arts, but to become better prepared for many things a child may do in the future.

Dr. Robert Root-Bernstein expanded on this thinking at the annual conference of New Jersey Art Educators earlier this month.  He shared research that sustained arts and crafts participation over a lifetime correlates with being an innovator.  Training in observation and practice visualizing things teach skills that chemists and geneticists, amongst others, can call on when performing scientific research.   A lifetime skill of seeing what is important and detecting changes and patterns converts to many future fields.  Art education contributes in preparing a student to be better at just about anything.  Addressing particularly careers in science, technology, engineering an mathematics or “STEM” Dr. Bernstein went so far as to report that adding “Art” to STEM gives it STEAM!

I hope many of you can join us on the 31^st for Dia de los Muertos.  In the meantime, keep an eye out for a display of Aztec style tin suns!  Between now and then we’ll see what other visual creations will emerge for the celebration.