Teaching Philosophy

“A creative course co-taught by an engineering faculty and an artist empowers the embedding of creative experiences into the lives and learning of students." Francesco Fedele

I believe that Academia urges to rediscover the consciousness of teaching by infusing arts into the academic curriculum. We are in need to define a new paradigm of conscious teaching with a broader view of the arts, culture, and creativity as critical for the formation of “holistically and consciously aware students”. Teaching is at risk of becoming algorithmic, computational as merely executed by automatons as those defined by Roger Penrose (1989).

I strongly believe that the most important impact of my Art-Science synergy initiative on students is an improvement of the student mental health and thus more self-confidence, more self-esteem because the student has created something. I have taught the special topics course CEE8824 "Art and Geometry" with the support and collaboration of professional Rachel Grant of the Atlanta community. It is important that engineering students are exposed to diverse sources of energy in their teaching experience in order to broaden their mind horizon.

A creative course co-taught by a faculty and a professional artist will empower the embedding of creative experiences into the lives and learning of students. This will empower the creation of an environment that enables innovation at the intersection of art, science and technology.

More importantly, students work in a gentle (stress-free) environment and they are able to focus on their drawing skills. They draw by observing nature in order to enhance student capability in capturing the essential elements of reality by means of the language of geometry. Drawing from observation helps develop critical thinking skills and alters how the artist observes and engages with the world around them.

EMPOWERMENT OF DIVERSITY More importantly, Arts are universal and my art initiatives in Engineering will empower the discovery and success of talented students from racial, ethnic, and gender backgrounds that are underrepresented in their academic field. The universality of the arts will also empower the discovery of talented female artists of the Atlanta community, who wish to undertake a career in academia. The teaching experience at Georgia Tech is a great opportunity to support their entrance in the academic world and undertake a teaching career.

- Francesco Fedele, Atlanta December 11 2019

HISTORY OF THE ARTS Week 1: From the Renaissance to the Modern Art period. Weeks 2: Studying the Masters of Arts: Giotto, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Raffaello, Michelangelo, Rubens, Bernini, Caravaggio, Titian, Giorgione Weeks 3: Studying the Masters of Arts: Vincent Van Gogh, August Renoir, Claude Monet, Eduard Manet, Berthe Morisot, Paul Cezanne, Pablo Picasso, George Braque, Amedeo Modigliani, Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, Andre’ Lhote, Tamara de Lempicka, Edward Hopper, Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Giorgio de Chirico, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock Week 4: Einstein versus Picasso. Picasso artwork: blue period, rose period, African period, Analytical and synthetic Cubism period, late years; geometric and esthetics concepts in sciences and arts. Poincaré’s insights on time and simultaneity and their influence on the discovery of Einstein’s relativity and Picasso’s cubism.

GEOMETRY Week 5: Vector spaces, scalar and wedge products, covariant and contravariant vectors, dual spaces Week 6: Dual spaces, covectors, Cartan’s differential forms, variational calculus. Week 7: Geometry of manifolds: intrinsic formulation, the concepts of chart and atlas Week 8: Tangent and Cotangent spaces, tangent and cotangent bundles, concept of metric Week 9: Covariant derivative, fiber bundles, geometric connections, parallel transport, geodesics, geodesic equations Week 10: geodesic deviations, Riemannian curvature tensor, Ricci tensor, Bianchi’s identity. Week 11-12: Geometric approach of rigid-body mechanics; Lagrangian and Hamiltonian of a free particle and rigid bodies, holonomic and non-holonomic constraints. Week 13: Special relativity, time and space are relative Week 14: General relativity and Einstein’s equations Week 15: Wave phenomena: what is a wave? Definitions, Properties, Wave dispersion and physical examples, Einstein’s gravitational waves

ART STUDIO LABS Week 1: Intro to the Artist, intro to art supplies, Positive and Negative Spaces Week 2: Gesture, Blind Contour and Contour Week 3: Still life drawing: Elements of Art, Picture Plane, use of the viewfinder Week 4: Intro to Still Life drawing/painting and principles of art, Introduce shadow theory, graphite value scales, sphere, cone and cylinder drawing Week 5: Drawing still life composition, use of negative space Week 6: Contour drawing with ink, line weights, gradient scales Week 7: Drawing using hatching, cross hatching, stippling, shading. Shadow theories Weeks 8-9: One-point and two-point perspectives and shadows Weeks 10-12: Principles of figure drawing: human forms, proportions and structure. From line gestures, essential forms to figures. Weeks 13-15: Life and portrait drawing, self-portrait.

STUDENTS' STUDIES OF HUMAN FORMS AND GESTURES