“STEM skills are critical for every student, but the creativity portion must also be adopted to produce an innovative workforce… STEAM teaches students by way of reality-based authentic units to synthesize, how to inter-relate, build systems, process acquired facts, and question information by manipulating & observing data in more complex situations. … Teachers can work together to provide in-depth coverage of their areas of expertise while reinforcing what students are learning in other specific fields… The current curriculum does not have to change. Educators can control STEAM and build on it as needed. STEAM provides a common thread throughout all subjects. By teaching across all fields, the transference of knowledge is directly supported and blended unilaterally. There are no special labs needed. STEAM was created with special education and gifted students in mind. STEAM correlates with Common Core Standards of Mathematics by making conjectures about meaning, ability to probe, construct viable arguments, utilize hands-on modeling, and express ideas verbally and in written form. STEAM is gifted education throughout the curriculum and all classes.”
“STEAM is enhancing our school culture. We are seeing innovative engagement on both the part of our teachers and students. Georgette provides a highly engaging training where teachers are encouraged and supported to reflect and collaborate. Georgette is to staff development what The Beatles are to music."
Science and Technology are understood as the basis of what the world has to go forward with, to be analyzed and developed through Engineering and the Arts, with the knowledge that everything is based in elements of Mathematics. It is a contextual curriculum where the subjects are coordinated to co-support each other under a formal educational structure of how science, technology, engineering, mathematics and the broad spectrum of the arts, all relate to one another in reality. This framework, not only includes the art of aesthetics and design, but also the art divisions of the liberal, language, musical, physical and manual. The STEAM structure explains how all the divisions of education and life work together, therefore it offers a formal place in the STEM structure for the Language Arts, Social Studies, and the purposeful integration of the exploratory subjects including; the Arts, Music, CTE and Physical Education divisions of public education. Shifting to a STEAM perspective means understanding learning contextually; not only in terms of having a framework that illustrates where the subjects overlap, but also in providing a living and adaptable learning structure for ever-changing personal and unpredictable global development.
S-T-E-M with the A includes;
• sharing knowledge with communication and language arts, ‘voice’ – impact, power, legacy
• a working knowledge of manual and physical arts, including how-to and fitness,
• better understanding the past and present cultures and aesthetics through the fine arts,
• rhythmic and emotional use of math with the musical arts,
• understanding sociological developments, human nature and ethics with the liberal arts…
STEAM is proving successful in schools all around the world to better teach academic and life skills in a standards-backed, realistic-based, personally relevant exploratory learning environment. It is adaptable, strong, benchmarked, measurable, and reinforces state standards and integrates with the Common Core in unique and engaging ways. It is backed with the major educational philosophies, classroom management and assessment strategies. It promotes deeper understanding and transference of knowledge across the subjects. It is used for developing model educational programs to create functionally literate people by increasing the depth and breadth of proficiency in all students and educators and the communities they influence. It works by expanding a program’s current lesson plans into STEAM plans for more realistic discovery and innovation for all types of learners.
STEAM can help make good education better. The STEAM framework, like steam itself, can fit anywhere and take innumerable shapes, and if used purposely can be a very powerful and enjoyable tool for teaching and learning any level of any topic. It delivers high quality team-based education to all students. Preparing children for a growing variety of careers is important to advance the global society and economies. Careers, past, current and potential are organized to be taught with STEAM. Students are taught to evaluate needs, wants and opportunities in order to be informed users, responders & innovators. It prepares students to be life-long learners in pursuit of college, skilled trade programs, potentially yet unknown career paths and well-balanced lives.
STEAM is a whole-learner, community-involved and influenced learning environment. It has living-curriculum structure that is representative of the surrounding culture and aware and tolerant of all types of diversity, perspectives and changes.
Classrooms: Embedded in the framework is a system to establish well-balanced teams among educators and students based on a variety of characteristics. All participants have ways they are advanced and are challenged. With this system, their skills are used for leading in some areas while other areas are strengthened through observing and assisting. Educators instruct within their specialty with a co-planned thematic units that everyone contributes to in projects related to the required benchmark concepts and skills.. There are times when various groups of educators co-teach overlapping subject areas and assignments. Special times are designated for working on projects, so that as new concepts are learned they can be applied and built upon. The classrooms and common areas become a network of specialty topics in a living and growing discovery place.
Students: All learners further investigate and coordinate topics and tangents, learn and teach others for more perspectives in discussions and on projects. This results in an impressive variety of viable solutions and extensions to authentic problems. They soon start using knowledge and skills from across the subjects to back up their discussions and have deeper understanding and recall of concepts when reminded of related activities. Students develop an ability to recognize and respect their own and other’s varying skill sets and intelligences. They learn how to best fit into teams based on roles that they have a predisposition to do well at, and how they and others create society. They more naturally know how to use team dynamics help solve conflicts and side conversations are reported as being more on-topic. Students look forward to these activities and take more measures to prepare for missing work during these times.
Educators: STEAM Educators report feeling rejuvenated by richer living work environments. They have the ability to use more diversification of teaching methods and be more of a facilitator to learners. It empowers educators to meet the guidelines in a variety of unique and engaging ways and meaningfully cross-reference concepts and vocabulary. They have the opportunity to teach collaboratively, exchange ideas, have easier preparations for substitutes and have more productive common planning times. The teachers report feeling the positive shift from ME to WE. They report more personal and student engagement with student self-direction for project-based, discovery learning. They state that through the structure of rubric-based portfolios and process work, they have a better (broader and deeper) understanding of what their students prove they know in different ways including what they can tangibly accomplish. Educators can better match their learning objectives and goals to the variety of learners they encounter.
Communities: STEAM promotes a structure of community and business partnerships with schools and has a record of higher engagement among educators, all levels and types of students and families for both program and ecological sustainability. STEAM programs rotate displays in the common areas of the schools and have community meetings and program information nights. Educators report parent engagement and donations are increasing.
Themes: STEAM Education is how ALL subjects and peoples are recognized, can contribute and all effort is encouraged. It is hoped to be a factor in diminishing the drop-out, unemployment and poverty rates, having to teach to the test instead of the individual and the disproportionate percentage of women and minorities in leadership positions.
Many programs choose to revolve their STEAM curriculum framework around themes, such as;
• Power & Energy
• Elements & Processes
• Life & Movement
• Transportation
• Communication
• Music
• Inventions
It is necessary to have many varied experiences for students to be successful in this rapidly developing technological world, but it can still be done inexpensively.
The 20th century was based on local linear engineering of complicated systems. We made cars, airplanes and chemical plants for example. The 21st century has opened a new basis for holistic non-linear design of complex systems, such as the Internet and air traffic management. Interconnectivity, communication and interaction are major attributes of our evolving society. But, more interestingly, we have started to understand that chaos theory may be more important than reductionism, to better understand and thrive on Earth. Systems need to be investigated and tested as wholes, which requires a cross-disciplinary approach and new conceptual principles and tools. Consequently, schools cannot continue to only teach isolated disciplines based on simple reductionism. Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) should also be integrated together with the Arts to promote creativity together with rationalization, and move (back) to STEAM (with an “A” for Arts). This concept shift emphasizes the possibility of longer-term socio-technical futures instead of short-term financial predictions that currently lead to uncontrolled economies. Human-centered design (HCD) can contribute to not only improving education technologies, systems and practices, but also as a discipline offering an integrated approach to learning by doing, expressing and critiquing, exploring possible futures, and understanding complex systems: HCD supports learning thinking.
Learning thinking is taken as a conceptual analog to design thinking (Plattner, Meinel & Leifer, 2011) and more specifically learning by doing. In particular, the shift from the unidirectional show society to a virtual freely connected society requires new models where creativity (Arts) and STEM disciplines can be integrated. It appears that in many countries worldwide, young people are less interested in science and engineering careers, i.e., what is now commonly called STEM . This seems to be a question of motivation (i.e., it is nowadays less rewarding to be an engineer mainly because it is less valued as before) and leadership. Standardization took the lead and individual technical engagement is not here anymore; conversely, business careers are more appealing because they appear to have a much better return on investment.
Human-centered design (HCD) is about cognitive engineering, life-critical systems, advanced interaction media, modeling and simulation, organization design and management, complexity analysis and assessment, creativity and design thinking, functional analysis, and user experience (Boy, 2013). HCD not only provides us with tools and techniques to build useful and usable things, it also provides an integrated approach to learning by doing, exploring possible futures, and understanding complex systems. This is what learning thinking is about. Consequently, HCD is a very appropriate approach that would enable the re-design of education systems taking into account learning thinking.
More specifically, the HCD Orchestra framework is a thought-provoking metaphor that enables us to describe the possible evolution of organizations, and educational systems in particular. Of course, it will need to be tailored, modified and reshuffled to be really useful and usable for the design and development of future educational systems. In particular, the issue of orchestrating autonomy and competence requires more investigation. In addition, technology tremendously modifies our old ways of learning and teaching. People need to learn and master critical thinking because the Internet allows us to access “knowledge-by-proxy”.
Knowledge is available but understanding is not guaranteed without specific training. Students can be more autonomous but they need to properly assess their consumption and understanding of concepts. They will need to identify the central questions or problems raised by what you’ve read on the Internet. They need to be able to answer a wide range of questions that would engage them in critical thinking. Who sponsored the publishing of the information and do respected institutions support the concepts? What are the core concepts you’ve learned and how can you articulate them? What will it require to put these concepts into practice? How might individuals in other circumstances interpret the concepts or put them into practice?
It is time to come back to long-term thinking. There are needs for building possible futures where sustainable
energy must be further investigated together with the shift from the Military model to the Orchestra framework. We must cooperate and coordinate more, and new information technologies promise a great deal. Such goals will tremendously motivate young people whether at school or at home. Education can certainly be a great contributor to the evolution toward human-centered longer-term sociotechnical possible futures, which should replace our current short-term financial predictions that inevitably lead to chaotic economies. Let’s conclude with Alan Kay’s 1971 famous quote, “the best way to predict the future is to
invent it.”
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