Drawing, writing, and painting with soils
How creative practices and communication tools can help bridge the gaps among soil scientists, students, and the public
Some researchers advocate using artistic practices—painting, writing, and multimedia—to visualize and communicate complex soil science concepts, such as the vadose zone, to broader audiences.
These creative approaches help connect people to invisible soil processes, fostering public understanding and appreciation.
Writing-to-learn exercises and art-based fieldwork to help students connect personally with soil science, increasing engagement, understanding, and motivation to learn.
Making the invisible visual
Soils have long been the subject of visual art, and soil itself has been used as an art-making medium for millennia. But Wessolek and Toland posit that soil art is a distinct category of works “in or with soil or about soil conservation issues, expressed via a wide range of artistic disciplines resulting in a multisensory esthetic experience.”
One such example, specifically about the vadose zone and exemplifying the researcher–artist collaborations Wessolek and Toland advocate, is connected to Germany’s “WindNODE” research project, executed between 2018 and 2021. To transport energy from oceanside windmill farms in the north of the country to the south, the location of the country’s auto industry, a 4000-km-long cable line was installed in the soil. With this installation, the soil transformed from purely agricultural land to an energy transport medium, and its properties and functions changed, too. The soil now transfers heat from the electricity transport into the surrounding soil environment, preventing the cables themselves from getting too hot.
But most people likely do not understand, or have never even contemplated, the role soil plays in electricity generation, Wessolek says. “The cable liner slowly disappears into the landscape,” he continues, “and nobody remarks that there is electricity underground.” To illustrate and illuminate the interplay between soil and energy use, Wessolek created a painting depicting cross sections of the energy cable surrounded by heat transport equations. Also as part of this multidisciplinary collaboration, artist Betty Beier collected a sample of the soil at the cable installation site before digging began and prepared it on a canvas.
Something as simple as the very language researchers use to tell soils’ story can also help bridge the gap between science and public, says ASA, CSSA, and SSSA member Alan Franzluebbers. In a recent commentary published in Agricultural & Environmental Letters, Franzluebbers, an ecologist with USDA-ARS and North Carolina State University, argues that scientists may have success fostering appreciation for soil using storytelling techniques that connect soil health to something most people are intimately familiar with: human health.
“Why do we even call it soil health?” Franzluebbers reflects. “Well, because soil is living.” Both systems rely on interconnected functions. Much like we breathe, soil releases CO2 into the atmosphere. And as humans need nutritious food to survive, soil requires organic matter inputs, Franzluebbers writes. Human veins and arteries are like the soil pores that transport water and nutrients, human digestion is akin to soil microbial activity.
“For the student, that’s so far away,” Wessolek says of the historical events that created Berlin’s soils. “But when we dig [in] the soil, suddenly they can see it. It is a completely different method to enter soil science,” he continues. “It’s not abstract anymore.”
Making soils personal can also motivate students’ learning in the soil science classroom. Pressler has found success in integrating self-directed writing-to-learn exercises in the soil morphology course she teaches. In the assignments, students often write about their lives, their backgrounds, their interests, and their aspirations. “I'm hopeful that if they connect the course content to something that matters to them, they're more likely to remember it, and importantly, it helps increase intrinsic motivation for their own learning,” Pressler says. “There's always a way to connect it back to soils because soils are connected to so many different things.”
At the 2024 ASA, CSSA, and SSSA Annual Meeting (now known as CANVAS) in San Antonio, TX, Pressler presented on the outcome of implementing writing-to-learn exercises in her soil science courses. The writing-to-learn approach engages students in short, low-stakes writing activities to help them think through concepts. Unlike writing to communicate ideas to an audience, writing-to-learn is meant to facilitate a student’s own understanding of what they’re writing about. Every week, Pressler’s students write “mini-notes” in which they take an idea from class and connect it to something they already know. At the end of the course, Pressler has them collect ideas from these writings and develop an integrative essay intended to communicate something related to soil.
The impact of such assignments might seem ephemeral, but research shows that writing-to-learn supports students’ scientific concepts and methods. In a 2018 study, Colorado State University science education researcher Meena Balgopal found that integrating writing-to-learn tasks in an undergraduate-level cell biology lecture helped students perform better in the course. It also helped them become more proficient at writing-to-communicate.
Pressler met and collaborated with Balgopal as a graduate student at Colorado State and began integrating writing-to-learn exercises into her own pedagogy when she came to Cal Poly. Soil science can be a particularly fruitful subject for students to explore through writing. “Soils are complex, dynamic systems, and in order to understand how soils form across space and across time, there are a lot of different interdisciplinary pieces of things we need to know. That complexity can be challenging for students to tease apart,” Pressler says.
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