Review of Selim Jamil Tlili's "Sketching for Science"

Photography since its advent has served science by capturing images needed for examination in depth. Nevertheless, those dealing in science have always understood that sketching is integral to understanding such images. Henry Gray could have utilized early photography to capture the bodily structures which he represented in Gray’s Anatomy, first published in 1858, but he included the sketches of a colleague because both physicians knew that sketching the structures is how students best understand them.

Many years later, we are all saturated by mechanical and digital imagery. Worse than devices producing the imagery which we examine, increasingly we rely on Artificial Intelligence (AI) to interpret this imagery. We delight in snapping a photo of a commonplace plant with small pink flowers and having an app classify it as Achillea taygetea (yarrow), but by so doing, we lose the understanding of why this plant is thus classified (e.g., flat-topped flowers in clusters, small and indented leaves, etc.). This loss is what Selim Jamil Tlili hopes to prevent in Sketching for Science (2025).

The book begins with Tlili’s own experience in institutional education. He was one of those students who could cram then perform well on tests, but he rarely had assignments and material which piqued his attention. Like all young students, he teemed with innate curiosity, but top-down, cookie-cutter lesson plans never engaged him enough to absorb the material when it was taught. After earning two masters degrees in the sciences, Tlili became an educator and confronted this issue from the teacher’s perspective. This is when he began to think about unconventional ways to engage students’ natural curiosity and customize their experience in learning.

Tlili admits that he was no Michelangelo when it came to sketching. Stick figures were the limit of his prowess in sketchwork, but he did realize that sketching uniquely engages the creative part of a student’s brain. With practice, anyone can improve the techniques required to sketch an image. As a student’s artistic mastery increases, he begins to think less about the effort exerted when sketching – and the lingering self-consciousness and doubt which hampers a novice – and thinks more about the observed objects’ structures and textures. That is when the magic happens! It is one thing for a teacher to tell the student that plant cells are rectangular, but by sketching those cells directly, the student neurophysically internalizes that detail.

More than a mere argument in favor of the pedagogy of sketching, this book systematically teaches educators how to develop proficiency in sketching. Tlili even includes blank pages so that readers can begin to sketch the world around them, which personally I found helpful since stick figures were also the extent of my skill at sketching!

For my readership’s sake, here I should clarify that Sketching for Science is anomalous to other books which this blog has reviewed. Tlili’s book is apolitical, so it has no “agenda,” much less one angled to Libertarianism. Readers of any ideological persuasion will enjoy this book and derive great value from its teachings. Homeschooling parents like myself will find it indispensable to enlivening lessons in the sciences. Sketching for Science is a resource dedicated to offering the student an active role in his own education, rather than delegating that responsibility to machines and AI.

Maybe that is a commendable agenda after all.