Thursday, June 26, 2014

STEAMing Ahead: How STEM has Evolved

by Alyssa Guarino, Junior Project Manager

With the push to expand focus on science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) in curricula, there have been worries that the arts will be left behind. The notion of adding the arts into STEM has been floated around, with many educators considering “STEAM” over STEM. In 2012, John Maeda, former president of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), announced his initiative, which promotes integrating art and design into STEM education (thus creating STEAM) in order to spur innovation. Maeda points to a history of art and science collaboration, and, in an interview published by the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA), says that he encourages those “who are leading economic growth, making change happen and becoming leaders of the twenty-first century, because they’re not held to the classical business school or technology school background.” As an example of the historical success of integrating arts into science, the STEAM site references Charles Négre, a nineteenth-century artist who used his training as a painter and interest in optics to pursue photography. Négre is quoted as saying, “Where science ends, art begins.” Maeda also points to the Renaissance movement as evidence that art and science naturally work well together, noting that in Leonardo da Vinci’s time, “they coexisted naturally.”

Da Vinci’s innovative works represent his desire to capture, reflect and improve upon the world around him, a notion that is not absent amongst this century’s young creatives. Leading tech giants such as Google and Apple continue to foster the idea that the arts are a necessary part of technological development. While the arts have often been a target of budget cuts, a three-year study released in 2008 by the Arts and Cognition Consortium of the Dana Foundation found that the arts correlate to improvements in math and reading scores along with increases in attention, cognition, working memory and reading fluency.

On a local level, many communities are trying to adopt STEAM. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, city and school officials have been working together to add the arts into their STEM model. While local institutions have teamed up with Cambridge Public Schools (CPS), the city is aiming to develop a centralized department to better coordinate STEAM programs and internship opportunities for students. Officials recognize that STEAM is an asset to the regional workforce and want to make sure that students keep this in mind throughout their time in CPS, especially by the time they are considering their options for college and the workforce. Cambridge is part of the state’s Metro North region, of which a large number of workers are employed through the STEM fields. Thus, STEAM can be seen as a venue to further the job field and offer students a richer learning experience.

In California, the San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD), which offers schools with magnet programs, has had the opportunity to increase its focus on STEAM. In 2013, the Magnet Schools Assistance Program (MSAP) awarded SDUSD a federal grant for use in four of its elementary schools. Since then, the SDUSD Visual and Performing Arts (VAPA) department has developed STEAM curricula for third-, fourth- and fifth-grade teachers. Lessons using these curricula combine traditional science lessons with dance, theater and visual art. Some examples include using dance to teach about electricity and electromagnets and creating abstract art to understand atoms and molecules. The main message here? Teaching the STEM subjects is important, but don’t forget to get creative.

Did You Know?


In February 2014, the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities (a2ru) hosted the Emerging Creatives Student Conference at Stanford University. Students from 25 different schools participated. This conference “focused on providing the inspiration and tools needed to help this group of emerging creatives develop, execute and sustain new interdisciplinary collaborative endeavors,” offering students the chance to collaborate in experiential “design thinking bootcamps.” Among the students’ creations was “the humorous and macabre MicroMort app,” a tool for predicting users’ likelihoods of dying during each of their daily activities.

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