Promote Mental Wellness Teaching With Studio Thinking

The University of Minnesota Rochester (UMR) team, led by Yuko Taniguchi, created an art studio for UMR Bachelor of Sciences Health Sciences (BSHS) students. The Creative Studio, repurposed from an underutilized classroom, aligns with the MPact 2025 systemwide strategic plan to promote student mental wellness and success, and to serve the state and the world. To address urgent student mental wellness needs through a novel approach, this project included the following goals: 

• provide student wellbeing opportunities to engage in exploratory, hands-on creative processes (see Sample 1, Sample 2, Sample 3, Sample 4)
• promote opportunities for faculty to integrate studio art into their teaching where appropriate

This team surpassed both goals! Student engagement exceeded goal expectations as hundreds of students engaged with each other in the open studio. Likewise, more than a dozen instructors across disciplines (biology, biochemistry, First-Year Seminar, philosophy, ethics, humanities, history, public health, etc.) integrated studio art into their teaching and learning, as exemplified in the samples above. Faculty used the studio to support student wellbeing, visual explorations of scientific concepts, ethical inquiry and narrative-based learning. To sustain and expand this momentum, the UMR team is developing a Creativity Studio webpage to share practical information, including a section, “Where Science Meets Expression: Integrating Arts and Health,” that will showcase examples of course-based projects, highlight interdisciplinary teaching practices and visually document student work created in the studio.