Introduction to STEAM:
STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) has been around long enough for educators to evaluate its outcomes and practices in different schools in the US. However, not to long ago, many educators already proposed adding an “A” (for arts) to STEM, sparking a national discussion regarding whether humanities have a place in the area of STEM education. The assumption was that the “A” was as vital as any of the other fields of STEM.
Background:
Although there are proponents of transitioning from STEM to STEAM to integrate the humanities, the movement was mostly championed by John Maeda-President of the Rhode Island College of Design (RISD) from 2008-2013-who defended this proposal at Concordia University in 2016. He proposed that the Arts (including subject field, fine arts, music, design-thinking, and language arts) were crucial elements to innovation, and that the idea was not to give more or less time to one particular discipline, but rather include, wherever applicable, the creative and design-related skills and thinking processes to student-learning in STEM.
Why STEAM is important in education?
Today’s designers are creative beast, operating in open workspaces, sharing ideas globally with other alternative thinkers, and mixing their STEM powers with some killer STEAM skills. Today’s Google staff isn´t just software system engineers or coders sitting in dark rooms lit solely by laptop monitors. They’re design-thinkers who spent 20% of their time developing their projects with passion.
STEAM encourages curiosity, how?
John Dewey, the pragmatist, powerfully believed the integration of subjects and in permitting youngsters to simply raise their hands and ask questions out of their natural curiosity. Still many secondary school teachers tend to believe that students ask questions because they don´t understand, not because they are curious.
STEAM attracts students to STEM fields:
This fractioning of areas of study and the target on testing and rigor contributes to the low levels of student engagement in STEM-especially for students of colour and females. But maybe one of the issues is that we haven´t given STEM or STEAM a chance to work right.
The great concern is that adding the “A” to STEM would possibly distract from the other letters of STEM. As artist and educator Ruth Catchen points out in Education Week, the arts may serve as a way to engage students to STEM subjects, particularly those that are under-represented.
How to make it work?
To make STEM really work, we should always embrace the Arts. Today, 21st-century STEM professionals are also all-round design-thinkers and skilful communicators. However, real STEAM success lies in adjusting our larger policies and testing structures to account for integrated STEAM study.
Finally, we should make STEAM study meaningful, relevant, and connected to the real world. It is not a matter of just making it interesting, is it a matter of making STEAM real-world learning.
INFINITE SPUR is determined to make this happen for their students, and it has created programs such as Spanish artists course (20th CENTURY SPANISH ARTISTS: PICASSO, DALI & MIRO) This course will explore the life and work of these three internationally recognized Spanish artists within the wider framework of the European art movements at the turn of the 20th Century. Students will learn about the life and work of Picasso, Dali and Miro. These artists will be studied first as young students in Madrid in the Residencia de Estudiantes and then as Avant-garde young painters wrestling between acceptance and rejection of their artistic works. Located in Madrid which is one of the foremost and vivacious cities of Europe. In addition to that, we should highlight that his is a multiple destination course and students have opportunity to travel Barcelona home to a number of the foremost prestigious trendy Spanish painters and designers whose works resonate in the city culture.
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To facilitate the learning the course is delivered in English and the faculty is a combination of professional and experts of different fields including the arts, but also artist, architects and designers from prestigious universities and companies from Spain and abroad.
