Renewed interest in the arts as a learning tool has officially turned the national STEM program into STEAM – something every middle school teacher knows, as well as what those acronyms stand for, says Lis Bech, a visual arts teacher at Sebastian Middle School.
“Common edu-speak,” she notes.
With another school year getting underway on Monday should come a growing appreciation of what those capital letters signify.
STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. A perception that American students were falling behind those in other first-world countries in these subjects has led to an emphasis on them in public school curricula, and promoted the adoption of new national and state standards for teaching.
The “A” in STEAM stands for Art. The past few years has seen a growing movement to include the materials, processes, and techniques of art in science, math and language arts classrooms.
STEAM is part of the educational approach in the Vero Beach Museum of Art Summer Art Camp for children, too.
“Definitely,” says the museum’s Director of Education, J. Marshall Adams.
“Teachers with whom we work for Summer Art Camp are often K-12 teachers in our school districts,” he adds. “When we ask them to work with STEAM they say, ‘Yeah, we can do that.’”
Cathleen Tinder, a science teacher at Sebastian Charter Junior High, completed an assistantship this summer at San Francisco’s famed Exploratorium, a science museum that has attracted both praise and enthusiastic audiences with its interactive approach to learning.
Beginning in late June, Tinder spent three weeks at the Exploratorium Teacher Institute, where she helped design and create exhibits. A part of her day was spent in the museum’s production shop, where she learned how to use art and design principles to craft not only large-scale interactive exhibits for the museum’s visitors, but also portable models of the exhibits to take back to her classroom.
One of those exhibits was a “squeeze box” that “simulates how faulting and folding take place in the earth’s crust,” says Tinder.
Made of wood and see-through sheets of clear acrylic, the simple box-like device is filled with alternating layers of brown sand and white salt. A paddle is then used to push the sand to one end of the box, which squeezes the layers of contrasting colors into a jagged, accordion-like pattern in much the same way that an earthquake disrupts layers of earth and rock.
Because the materials used in the device are readily available, and the manufacture of a squeeze box is within the capabilities of a middle-schooler, Tinder is thinking of showing her students the art skills she learned at the Exploratorium to create their own squeeze boxes.
“You’re teaching in parallel,” she says. “They’re learning art concepts as well as science ideas.”
Bech agrees. She is aware of the criticism that art in the science or math classroom can be presented as merely an enhancement to the lesson, rather than a means of communicating knowledge.
In Bech’s opinion, it is easier for art teachers to integrate science, technology, engineering and math into their lesson plans than it that it is for teachers of STEM subjects to integrate art into theirs.
“For instance, one of the big things I teach is color theory,” says Bech, who, in compliance with state educational standards, has her students read a complex text on color theory before they begin the creative part of the lesson. A complex text is a grade-appropriate reading assignment that introduces the students to unfamiliar words, technical terms, and concepts pertaining to a subject.
“I start out with Sir Isaac Newton, and the fact that he is the person that invented the color wheel,” Bech says.
Based on his work with prisms and his observation of the visible spectrum of light, Newton created his color wheel in 1704. His research led to the theory that red, yellow, and blue are the primary colors from which all other colors may be derived.
Learning about Newton’s experiments with light prepares Bech’s students to create their own color wheels. Learning about the arrangement of colors on the wheel into primary, secondary and tertiary hues leads the students to mixing colors with paint.
Using the STEAM approach to teaching might be a problem for a science or math teacher who feels out of her depth with art terms and techniques, or for an art teacher who feels flustered by science and math concepts. That’s when a teacher familiar with STEM subjects might join forces with her school’s art teacher to adopt the STEAM approach.
Bech, a 19-year teaching veteran, is familiar with both sides of the issue. She has a degree in elementary education as well as in art education.
“I have taken the methods classes for teaching science, or teaching language arts, for teaching all of these other classes, as well as art,” she says.
A handful of years ago the science coordinator in Bech’s district asked her to write some STEM lessons for seventh grade. With the addition of some exercises drawn from her art classroom, “I made them all STEAM,” Bech says with a chuckle.
Most of the lessons she wrote were science lab assignments. One project involved the students coating the interior of glass bottles with translucent pigments. That was the “art” part.
The science part had the students observing how light passing through the bottles casts the bottles’ colors onto a white surface, and how new colors are formed when different colors of light overlap.
Bech stresses that art as practiced in the science or math classroom is not “art for art’s sake.” Instead, students use art processes as part of their “hands-on” experience of scientific principles. Rather than absorbing information passively through listening to a lecture or reading a textbook, kids exercise their brains by creating, and then manipulating, artifacts to produce an observable phenomenon.
Bech maintains that students retain more of what they’ve learned through this active approach.
“That’s what STEAM is,” she says.
It used to be called “interdisciplinary learning,” Bech says, adding that she has always used the approach in her art classes.
“It’s been around for a while; it just has a new name.”
At the Vero Beach Museum of Art, J. Marshall Adams agrees that the integration of art education with other areas of learning is nothing new.
“Just in the past few years this cool acronym has come up, but museums have been doing this all along,” he says.
This summer, the museum enticed children into its Summer Art Camp by promising kids that they would “put Science-Technology-Engineering-Arts-Math thinking to work,” as Adams put it, with “projects that might be grounded in science but with an artistic flair.”
While the kindergarten set investigated the properties of pigment and what Adams called the “gravity of structure,” older children constructed Rube Goldberg machines, built hovercraft and race cars out of recycled materials, and upcycled their old clothes to create steampunk-inspired fashions.
But engaging children and adults in art through studio classes and workshops is only part of VBMA’s effort to combine STEM areas of learning with art.
The art educator must engage visitors with the issues of science, technology and engineering that are part of every art form and every art exhibition, notes Adams.
For example, the museum’s 2014 kinetic sculpture exhibition dealt with the science of translating energy from air currents, human touch, or electrical current, into motion. The recent James Prosek: Ocean Fishes show was as much about variation among species, the environment, and conservation as it was about beautiful paintings of fish.
“The museum has always been in the position of helping people make the connection to the art that is on display here,” Adams says.
