By Jennifer Gunn • November 8, 2017
STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) has been around a while now, long enough for educators to see its outcomes and practices unfold in schools across the nation. But not long ago, various educators proposed adding an “A” (for arts) to the STEM concept, sparking a national debate about whether the arts have a place in STEM education. Do you think the “A” is just as important as every other letter in STEAM? Concordia University-Portland does. Read on to learn more.
What is the History of STEM?
President Barack Obama put out the call in his 2011 State of the Union Address, igniting a movement to teach students 21st-century skills to become more competitive with other nations in the fields of STEM. Millions in funding from public and private sectors flooded in for teacher training, grants, research, and school programs that promote STEM study. In the last decade, we’ve seen an increase in math and science course offerings, higher expectations for testing, and an evolution of project-based learning using STEM as a framework for exploration. (Want to know more? Check out our blog post, The Evolution of STEM and STEAM in the U.S.)
STEM issues arise
With the nation’s push toward STEM, some say we may have pushed too far, excluding other necessary skills and marginalizing funding and attention for arts programs. While STEM isn’t meant to exclude other subjects, in many schools, that’s what’s happened. Resources can only spread so far, and with increased expectations for test results and measurable outcomes, schools are hard-pressed to defend an allocation of funds to arts programs and the like.
According to the latest STEM Index (U.S News and World Report), the racial and gender gaps are actually widening for science and math. STEM programs simply aren’t doing enough to attract and retain students of color or female learners.
And actually, STEM schools aren’t producing dazzling results. As noted in Educational Leadership (December 2014/January 2015),
- “A comparison of STEM and non-STEM schools in Florida and North Carolina found no evidence that students in STEM schools performed any better in mathematics (Hansen, 2014).”
- Although students in 30 STEM high schools in New York City performed better than those in regular public schools overall, the researchers found that “more thorough analysis conditioning on a rich set of covariates, including previous grade test performance, reduces or eliminates this advantage” (Wiswall, Stiefel, Schwartz, & Boccardo, 2014, p. 1).
- An Arizona study tracked students’ achievement before and after they transferred into nine STEM charter middle schools and two STEM magnet middle schools. After three years, students demonstrated higher achievement in the STEM charter schools (but no gains in the magnet schools), but researchers cautioned that the gains might simply reflect performance bumps (and selection bias) they observed in all students who transferred to new schools, regardless of the schools’ focus (Judson, 2014).
What is STEAM? – Arts in STEM Education
Although there have been many proponents of changing STEM to STEAM to incorporate the arts, the movement has been largely championed by John Maeda—president of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) from 2008-2013—who actually spoke at Concordia in 2016 on this very topic. He posits that the arts (including liberal arts, fine arts, music, design-thinking, and language arts) are critical components to innovation, and that the concept is not about giving equal or more time to STEM or arts, but to incorporate, where appropriate, the artistic and design-related skills and thinking processes to student-learning in STEM.
When we reached out to RISD to learn more, Babette Allina, Director, Government and Corporate Relations at RISD, told us: “Making the case for creativity was at the heart of the RISD-led movement to promote ‘STEAM.’ It succeeded because it was driven by student interest, and by K-12 teachers throughout the United States who knew that the practical application of interdisciplinary, project-based learning was a familiar methodology that worked. RISD’s advocacy platform reflected that grassroots knowledge – adding the ‘A’ for art and design to science, technology, engineering, and math to empower creatives and promote collaboration across the disciplines.”