Portal de Murcia
www.portaldemurcia.com
At a time when the computer was an entelechy, the ability to draw a science teacher was vitally important to make students understand certain subjects.
In these conditions, the blackboard and colored chalk became a powerful teaching tool, and the artistic capacity of certain teachers, in a quality much appreciated by the students.
Editum, the Publications Service of the University of Murcia, has just published an extensive compilation of one of those veteran professors, the professor of Cell Biology and Professor Emeritus of the UMU José Meseguer Peñalver, who has taught for more than 45 years at students of Medicine and Surgery, Nursing, Physiotherapy, Optics and Optometry, Biology, Environmental Sciences and Biotechnology.
With the title "Science and Art on the blackboard", the publication collects a good number of the drawings with which José Meseguer tried to teach some of these subjects to his students for decades.
Disclose by illustrating
Meseguer affirms that the best way to "disclose is to illustrate", for which he dedicated many hours of his activity "to produce images that have served specifically to illustrate the results of my activity as a professor and researcher".
In addition to an attractive and nostalgic catalog of works in which art and science walk hand in hand, the book is a whole treatise of illustration in teaching in which Meseguer exposes his way of making illustrations of a scientific nature with destiny to the classes, with such precise recommendations, which include the advice to split the chalk before its use "to avoid vibrating emitting a typical chirping", which gives an idea of ​​the meticulousness and passion for the teaching task.
Professor Meseguer says that the book is aimed at anyone who likes science and art, and "that is able to enjoy everything there may be beautiful and artistic in the representation of scientific observation, and in particular in the microscopic observation ".
For decades, José Meseguer took his time before each class, thinking about the best way to make his students understand each topic based on drawings: "Drawing on the blackboard during each class, involves narrating or telling a story in images before the class. eyes of the students during a limited time ".
The veteran professor affirms that, in these moments, the evaluation that is made of the teaching is very different from what was done in his first years as a teacher, when he developed mainly these drawings: "Then the transmission of information in the university had a very important value, the university professor had a sense of teacher, as a transmitter of information, with a relatively small level of research activity, but now we have moved on to the opposite situation: research has gained a lot of weight in the university, and teaching has happened to be less valued ".
Memory of an era
The book aims to record a time when drawing well, using color, verbal and written information on the blackboard was a very important means of transmission.
"When I started my teaching work in 1973 in the medical school, I had teachers who gave classes in this way, they made great drawings, both anatomically and microscopically."
Meseguer cites our Nobel Laureate Ramón y Cajal, on whose scientific drawings he made his second doctoral thesis, to highlight the importance of art in the dissemination of science.
The professor is aware of how fleeting his drawings were always ("we could almost define them as ephemeral art, something absolutely modern"), condemned to disappear after each class, but in spite of that, he affirms that he never considered his work as something inconsequential .
Those large black waxes of Medicine or Biology, with a rough background, in which Meseguer made his first works produced dust "were less compressed chalk" - but they could make impressive illustrations, "when we finished making those drawings that we it had taken an hour, it was a spectacular image ", but when the next teacher came in it was necessary to erase it.
"I remember that sometimes the bedeles asked me for permission to erase that, because they felt sorry for removing something so striking, but that had no desire for endurance, only had the ephemeral value of acquiring knowledge."
Some of the pictures included in the book correspond to drawings that his alumni copied from the blackboard.
As receiving the oral information and copying the drawings simultaneously was very difficult, it was common for the students to distribute the work, so that "while several students were dedicated to my words, there were others who were dedicated exclusively, during the whole hour , to make the drawings. "
Meseguer affirms that the book has been a response to the demand of professors, vice-rectors and the dean of his faculty, who asked him to do this compilation "so that this part of the teaching activity will not be forgotten, and to record a epoch, of a way of teaching that has been diluted over time ".
And here is this "Science and art on the blackboard", edited by the University of Murcia, where 113 drawings, plates and graphics that reflect the teaching of a time that we left.
An era in which the absence of technology left room for the most artisan work in teaching.
The book will be presented on Tuesday 16, at 13:30, in the room Hermenegildo Lumeras Espinardo Campus, and the presentation will intervene, in addition to the author himself: José Luján Alcaraz, rector of the UMU;
Alfonsa García Ayala, dean of the Faculty of Biology;
Rosana López Carreño, Coordinator of the Publications Service of the University of Murcia, and José Ángel López Jiménez, professor of the Department of Physiology.
Source: Universidad de Murcia
Privacy policy
- Legal notice
- Cookies