Radical bricolage: building coherence in the liberal arts using art modelling and language

Because of the very broad and fragmented nature of undergraduate general education requirements there is a need to help students find unity in diversity. The search for coherence has led my institution, the American University in Paris, to introduce a series of freshmen courses called First Bridge that deliberately pair professors from different disciplines to develop and teach a common course that explores the linkages between their areas of special interest. This article describes my own experience of teaching a First Bridge course called Visual Thinking and Artful Seeing, in which I represented the mathematics and computer science department while my coteacher, a painter, came from the art department. It was our intention to explore how different ways of seeing, the very act of seeing and the art of talking about seeing could help each of us begin to discover the commonalities that lie behind seemingly different disciplines and their methodologies. My part of the bargain requires using Imagine Logo to gain access to different levels of seeing by building computer models to examine a range of visual artefacts and their inherent structures.