STEM? CC – Ton Rulkens
STEM is an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. This has worried teachers of the arts and the humanities because at face value it seems to exclude those disciplines. I don’t know it was meant to at first since the STEM fields were competing against the others at a time when our country wanted desperately to beat the Russians to the moon but it isn’t meant to exclude anything now. STEM is a way of thinking that integrates all subjects the way people work outside of school. In industry, no one moves from Math to English to Science. Everything and anything that is needed is done by the team so in schools where kids learn Math, English, Science, and History in separate chunks, STEM reminds us to have experiences for students where they solve problems that incorporate the Science, the Engineering, the Math, the Technology, the Arts, Writing, and Reading!
[Note: A mere few hours after publishing this post I check some old Diigo links that I had saved for a later read and stumbled upon this similar post, yet way more indepth, on STEM and Integration by Nigel Coutts! No way! WAY!]
I responded to a comment on a blog post I wrote here and my response got me thinking of the purpose of STEM.
Here’s the part of my response that got me thinking:
“The more we embrace STEM, STEAM, STREAM, SHTEAM, whatever we call it, the more we mix and combine the CCSS-Math, CCSS-ELA, the NGSS, and any Social Studies standards. The mixing and blending of standards is perfect because what STEM calls for is integration to learn in the proper context. In school, especially secondary school, disciplines were separated to teach kids. I think it’s time to bring them all back together. Let them separate in higher ed, maybe for Masters or PhD work, where focusing is supposed to happen.
In the classroom history provides context, reading makes the information accessible, writing allows us to reflect and share what we are learning, and the Science guides us through making meaning with Tech and Math as tools for understanding. Add Engineering and we design solutions to the problems! It’s pretty awesome.”
So whatever you call this STEM, STEAM thing I keep hearing and repeating that it was never meant to leave out the humanities, reading, writing, or the arts. It’s all about sense-making.
So what do you think?
Does History provide a context?
Does Reading (or consuming media) provide us access to information/knowledge?
Does Writing (or creating media) allow us to reflect and share what we are learning?
Does Science guide us through asking and answering questions?
Are Math and Tech the tools to help us understand and answer our questions?
And does Engineering provide us the way to design solutions to our problems that we discover or create from all of the above??
And can all that be done in one classroom?!? (Isn’t that what Elementary teachers have been doing all along?)
STEAM?
When I first wrote about STEM back in 2011 I obviously didn’t get the whole integration thing! How embarrassing.
