When the concept of teaching a STEM curriculum in schools started to take off a few years back, I was among those who quickly started advocating for turning STEM into STEAM.
However, a thoughtful piece on Education Week gave me pause and made me realize blithely calling for the arts to be inserted without really understanding what the curriculum was all about is somewhat akin to deciding an English teacher directing a play after school is sufficient to meet arts standards.
According to author Anne Jolly, the arts isn’t something you can or should simply plug in to STEM like a Lego block. (my emphasis)
Recently, the idea of adding the arts to STEM programs has been gaining momentum. Surprisingly, I’ve heard push-back from both camps:
1. From STEM proponents: STEM lessons naturally involve art (for example, product design), language arts (communication), and social studies and history (setting the context for engineering challenges). STEM projects do not deliberately exclude the arts or any other subject; rather, these subjects are included incidentally as needed for engineering challenges.The focus of STEM is developing rigorous math and science skills through engineering. How can you focus on other subjects (such as art) without losing the mission of STEM or watering down its primary purpose?
2. From arts proponents: Engineering and technology can certainly serve the artist and help create art. But if we’re talking about how one can use art in engineering… as an artist, it seems we’re missing the point and devaluing, or not realizing, art’s purpose and importance. We have it backwards.
Jolly goes on to make some suggestions about how the arts can have a place in a STEM program, but none of them really feel like a clean melding of ideals, and she admits as much. As she points out numerous times in her writing, a good STEM program will never exclude an artistic component.
“Just one word of caution, though. Art is often touted as a method of adding creativity to STEM—but keep in mind that engineers are rarely lacking for creativity and ingenuity. Just look at the world around you for proof. The purpose of STEAM should not be so much to teach art but to apply art in real situations. Applied knowledge leads to deeper learning.”
This is one of those articles where every commenter has something insightful to add to the conversation. No one manages to come up with the definitive approach, but they draw attention to the issues that need to be considered in order that neither Arts or STEM get short shrift in a relationship.
As an engineering professor, I find that “STEM” is already too big a tent.
It is not true that there is an enormous shortage of workers in all STEM fields—biology, for example, has been over-producing graduates for 2 decades and has tremendous numbers of under-employed graduates.
Art shares some attitudes and approaches with engineering (an emphasis on making things over understanding things, for example), but not much with science and math.
I value art as an educational field, and I see a lot of potential in the “maker” movement, which attracts both artists and engineers, but I don’t think that stretching the already strained “STEM” grouping to “STEAM” serves anyone well. Why not add humanities (SHTEAM), social sciences (SSSHTEAM), and PE (SSPESHTEAM) while you’re at it?
Well I mean, for one, how are you going to rally people around such unwieldy acronyms?
But one thing I have never been able to determine is where exactly things apparently went off the rails that we now need to have these specialized curriculum tracks. Did the educational system falter or is the perceived dearth the result of a cultural shift or the combination of the two? Are STEM tracks going to solve the problem?
“Are STEM tracks going to solve the problem?” Which problem? There are many different problems in US education, and STEM tracks are only addressing a few of them.
I made those acronyms unwieldy for a reason—the concept that everything should be piled in together is unwieldy. The attraction of the STEM acronym is that people could be convinced that everything in it was close enough that simplistic solutions could help the entire field—not really true, but the sort of fiction educrats are comfortable with. The common thread was a heavy reliance on math (which falls apart once traditional biology is included in the mix). Putting art in the mix eliminates even the vestiges of that common thread, despite art’s overlap with engineering.
Art needs to find a different justification for inclusion in education than the STEM fields do, because the fixes needed to art education are different than the fixes needed to STEM education. Even the myths that need to be corrected are different.
Yeah, I was entertained by your unwieldy acronyms. I think you cut right to the heart of the matter when you note the myths that need to be corrected are different.