When she was attending Carson-Newman University in Tennessee, Amy Tiebout was one of only three students who had the rare double-major combination of art and biology.
“We kind of had a little niche pathway that we were doing,” recalled Tiebout on a recent episode of the Anatomy in Clay® Learning System podcast. “We got to work in the gross anatomy lab and we would just sit—and just sketch. And that was a fantastic experience … really cool.” At the time, Tiebout thought she wanted to be a medical illustrator.
However, her first job out of college was as a graphic designer. She also held jobs at the Knoxville Zoo and the Knoxville Museum of Art, working with youth groups and “always working with a kids in an educational role.” She decided to go back to school, this time to Bethel College to obtain her master’s degree in teaching.
“That was the best decision ever,” she said, “because I absolutely love what I do. It’s great.”
Tibeout said it helped that her father was a fisheries biologist in terms of picking up the science she needed to learn. Her father “was working out in the field all of the time conducting research and my mom was a school teacher and my neighbor was a neurosurgeon at the vet school and so I was kind of had some pretty good influences in that respect. But no, I wasn't really doing a lot with science per se in those twenty years after college … I kind of almost had to reteach myself.”
Coming out of the COVID pandemic at Penn High School in northern Indiana, teaching in a hybrid mode (some classes online), Tiebout was asked to switch from teaching freshman biology to teaching the Human Body Systems class because the Advanced Placement biology teacher decided to leave for a job in another state.
“So I go into her room and I'm looking up on the top of the cupboards and I see all these MANIKENS® up there with clay on them that had kind of been sitting there since 2020 when the schools closed down,” she said. “And there were 32 of them and I thought ‘oh, this is perfect.’”
That is, except for the fact all 32 models were built-out so the first thing Tiebout needed to do was separate the clay and clean the models.
Tiebout said building in clay creates a good way for her to know whether students have really grasped a concept.
High school students, she said, “will nod their head and say they understand something or they'll fill out a worksheet and think they understand it, but actually going and placing that clay in the right spot? This is where I really see if there's any misconceptions. Imagine building a bicep and only attaching it to the humerus, right? That’s exactly what I see when I walk around. Sometimes. I'm like, ‘okay, let's remember our muscle rules.’”
Tiebout thinks the intersection of art and science is a perfect fit with the Anatomy in Clay® Learning System using the Project Lead the Way (PLTW) approach.
“When I did the PLTW training, it was all this wonderful hands-on learning and. It was so exciting to me,” said Tiebout. “I'm like, ‘this how I really retain information the best way, you know?’ … There's something about that, the connection between your hands, especially working with clay. I think it just really kind of solidifies a lot of those concepts.”
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