Secondary Education and Teaching Commons^™

Using Steam To Increase Engagement And Literacy Across Disciplines, Robert L. Long Ii, Stephen S. Davis

The STEAM Journal

This paper explores STEAM as a solution to improving student engagement and helping students improve functional literacy across the curriculum. While STEM is a fairly established approach to curriculum, researchers and practitioners are continuing to develop and understand STEAM and its place in school curriculum. It is important that educators foster this holistic approach to education and strive to participate in active research associated with STEAM. It is also most advantageous for stakeholders to understand the importance of arts integration and its use to support collaboration, innovation, and creativity within students. Key strategies can be used to support arts integration …

A Brief History Of Stem And Steam From An Inadvertent Insider, Lisa G. Catterall

The STEAM Journal

This article traces a history of STEM and STEAM from the perspective of someone involved in arts integration research for the last 35 years, and proposes a vision for the next steps. It also provides an assessment of the risks inherent in current trends of STEAM roll-out in schools, from the lack of resources for professional development to the burgeoning market in STEAM kits and activity books that do not lead to the original learning goals of STEAM.

Intention, Questions, And Creative Expression: An Antidiscriminatory Diversity Statement, Hannah S. Bright

Scholarship and Engagement in Education

Supporting education that reflects diversity involves maintaining awareness of one’s personal positionality, creating safe and inclusive learning communities, and using creativity and choice to empower and honor student voice and individual development. When working in educational settings, teachers may involve students in selecting relevant materials, and follow their lead in creating critical dialogue about salient factors of identity.

Professional Friction: Racialized Discourse And The Practice Of Teaching Art, Jessica Kirker

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

Language is crucial in situating our selves and others. Discursive patterns create alliances or factions, establish hierarchies, and subjugate individuals or groups. In this autoethnographic study, I consider how I, as a White woman teaching art, participate in, maneuver, and manipulate spoken and unspoken racialized discourses within the context of a high school with a diverse population of students. Through the data collection process of journaling over one school year, I recorded reflections on conversations, speeches, and written communication with, between, and regarding teachers, students, parents, and school administrators.

I employed discourse analysis on these texts and draw upon Critical …

Engaging Many Minds: Nurturing Collaboration In A Steam Context, Mark Dzula

The STEAM Journal

This field note describes a recent interdisciplinary project facilitated by Jeremy Gercke, an art teacher at the Bishop's School in La Jolla, California. The project creates ceramic tile markers for flora around the Bishop's School campus. The markers feature QR codes linking to websites populated with student content, including: drawings, information, and oral histories. In this project, Mr. Gercke synthesizes his interests as an artist; maximizes his social connections to mentors, peers and students; and bridges disciplines to create opportunities for interdisciplinary (STEAM) inquiry.

The Curious Schools Project: Capturing Nomad Creativity In Teacher Work, Mary Ann Hunter, Sherridan Emery

Australian Journal of Teacher Education

The Curious Schools project is a teacher professional learning initiative that aims to provide an insight into – and resource for – creativity in Tasmanian schools. It offers an alternative to conventional models of teacher professional learning by engaging teachers in multi-modal methods of documenting and reflecting on their work as the basis for an online community of practice and public showcase for creativity in education that takes place ‘behind the scenes’. The authors, as coordinators of the project, describe the rationale behind the project and the ways it embraced discourses and practices of curiosity as a means of making …

Aesthetic Knowing: Essential To The Development Of Heart And Mind., Laura Howzell-Young, Susan Daniels

Journal of Critical Issues in Educational Practice

Children are biologically wired to experience their world through rich sensory, affective, aesthetic, and imaginal experiences. Children thirst for art, music and movement, and these modes are utilized widely to learn the varied languages of literacy: the alphabet, numbers, vocabulary, body-sense and more. Yet, in response to meeting higher and more prescribed standards at the elementary and secondary levels, there is a tendency to narrow the curriculum, to consider art and music expendable, to view social-emotional development as external to the schoolhouse. This narrowing is happening just as our global culture is moving again toward multiple kinds of communication: toward …