WHY I BELIEVE IN STEAM EDUCATION
When I envision STEAM education, I tend to make connections with what I understand about education in ancient Greece. I am by no means an expert in education history, but it seems that in those days, educators weren’t specialists, but had broad, multi-disciplinary knowledge, including science, medicine, physics, philosophy, and the humanities. The process of education of the young appeared to be a ‘two-way street’, and focused on direct experience.
Quite a difference with our more modern concepts of education which are focused on specialization and rote learning. Teachers are specialists, each with their own specific knowledge and teaching methods, and children are expected to somehow connect and meld all these diverse facts into a comprehensive whole. That’s a tall order, and most of them can’t. Moreover, there is also the expectation that our children can somehow figure out how to apply this theoretical body of knowledge to the challenges of the real and apply it there effectively.
In the last few decades, America’s major corporations have recognized that employees newly hired from universities and schools overall don’t have what it takes to be effective in corporate environments, and they have begun to look at the root causes of these deficiencies, and what can be done to transform the educational models.
Educational institutions, universities and schools have also increasingly begun to understand the deficiencies of current models, and STEAM is one of these models which is trying to address these deficiencies. I personally think that Project Based Learning (PBL) is naturally embodied in the STEAM programs. As in ancient times, STEAM is aiming to connect these diverse strands of knowledge into a more comprehensive whole, which can be effectively applied in practical situations.
Moving forward, I see a range of challenges;
How will STEAM curricula be built – by age group?
How will STEAM teachers integrate their specific knowledge and expertise into a broader framework that ties the various strands of STEAM together?
Can the test-oriented system which we currently deploy be adapted to STEAM in a hands-on, project-based, inter-disciplinary environment?
How can we built all this into a foundation for early childhood education – which is where it all starts…
In subsequent posts I will try to provide more insights into these challenges, specifically as they relate to early childhood education, as that ultimately is my main area of expertise…
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