Alexandra Ferrugia of the Massapequa UFSD, a dance student at Nassau BOCES Long Island High School for the Arts (LIHSA), was part of an unconventional, collaborative project recently. For more than 40 years, LIHSA has been the island’s only public arts high school.
LIHSA shares its campus with the Nassau BOCES Doshi STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) Institute. Created in 2013, the Institute is the first science-focused public high school program developed to help students prepare for careers in STEM-related fields. One of the greatest advantages of this shared campus is the opportunity for these distinctly different schools to collaborate and to lead the way for STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) education — adding the A for Arts to STEM.
“At Nassau BOCES, we are working to be at the forefront of the STEAM initiative, combining science, technology, engineering, mathematics and the arts,” said Jack Lenson, Interim Principal of both LIHSA and the Doshi STEM Institute. “The unique nature of our shared campus enables the integration of the STEM and arts disciplines, placing us at the vanguard of a movement that has gained significant support in the educational community.”
To that end, teachers from both programs are coming together to develop a variety of lessons for both the arts and science programs. While developing a lesson for her Kinesiology and Anatomy course (offered in conjunction with Long Island University), LIHSA Dance Instructor Dina Denis needed help in applying the laws of physics to dance. She worked with colleague Derek Paolina, Physics Teacher at the Doshi STEM Institute, to create a class that integrated elements of physics to help dancers in their efforts to maintain proper posture and form.
The STEM students worked with the LIHSA students to evaluate deviations in the dancers’ physical alignment. The fledgling physicists first helped the teen dancers to locate anatomical “bone landmarks” on their bodies with stickers. They then strung a plum line from the ceiling and had the dancers hold two-meter long sticks (for scale) while posing for a series of photographs taken from various angles to capture the anterior, posterior and lateral sides of their bodies.
The student physicists collected and analyzed the photographic data and used it to create a geometric representation of human alignment. The representation showed the angle and distance that each dance student was off alignment. Using the STEM student findings, the LIHSA dancers drew on their prior knowledge of bones, joints, common injuries and body planes of action to develop a movement-imagery-based plan for improving the discovered deviations.
“These collaborative experiences are both enlightening and empowering for students and teachers alike,” said Interim Principal Lenson.
On the heels of this successful collaboration, the LIHSA Theater Department reached out to the Doshi STEM Institute’s Principles of Engineering students to help with a production of Dracula. The STEM engineers designed and built a mechanical bat, which the technical theatre students completed with the appropriate theatrical effects. The two teams then worked together on the final phase, equipping the bat with the proper stage rigging.
