Could STEAM be the New STEM?
As the times change, we continue to create new terms for the future. Is STEAM this next big thing?
Pattie Matzie is an Undergraduate student at University of California Santa Cruz majoring in Marine Biology and Education.
Growing up, I had the opportunity to do just about anything I wanted — I could pursue anything and everything my heart desired, from exploring the unknown to creating new worlds all from one little idea. Imagination as large as an ocean all within my mind, and every other child’s mind. This imagination, dulled with age, is always active in everyone’s minds — I can say that for myself, at least, and the people around me.
As amazing as it would have been to pursue a career in an artistic field, I continued through school and drifted out of the idea of pursuing a future in creation and arts and shifted into a more biological and educational mindset — one that focused more on teaching some of the more difficult subjects, specifically those of math and sciences. I don’t know what made me shift what career I wanted to pursue so dramatically, but I know school was a large influence on it. Not only did school create such a workload on artistic endeavors, but it never made art an essential subject for students past elementary school. There instead was a heavy emphasis on the core school subjects — English, math, science, and history — all of which tried to give students some type of artistic approach but predominantly failed because many people don’t want to be forced into creating art that they have no motivation in creating.
But I know there are many people out there who do want to continue to create art through these mediums, heck, one of my best friends is pursuing computer science just to eventually create video games for themselves and other people to enjoy. But this isn’t something that is always implemented well in schools, especially because a lot of the curriculum isn’t flexible enough to allow students to think creatively in different subjects. The most creative thing I had ever done for any of my math classes was a picture on a graph and that was about it. And then I made another picture for biology. Oh there was that one model of Jupiter I made in third grade, that may be the most creative thing I ever made for a science class and it was literally based on a picture. What I’m saying is that it’s hard to think about some math and science fields, or STEM in general, in creative, new ways, when it is based on things that are so factual.
STEM — science, technology, engineering, and mathematics — is a concept that has been around for a long time, yet is a fairly new term. STEM is basically a broad term used to clump together all of the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics to make it easier to distinguish it from more artistic and humanitarian education and career fields. Its main purpose is to help children gain an interest in science and engineering and hopefully develop that interest into a future career. But what led to this massive cluster that has taken a stronghold grip in the world, and especially that of the United States?
Back in the 1950’s, many of the major powerful countries in the world were competing with one another in the Space Race to see who could launch a satellite into space and explore the stars first. But to the United State’s surprise, the USSR had launched their satellite, the Sputnik, into space, creating a huge wave of fear in the United States. In the eyes of the 1950’s government and population, the world was going to be taken over by communism because they weren’t the first to be in space. The government was terrified of what this could mean for the future of the country — were United State’s citizens not smart enough to launch a satellite?
This fear of not being advanced enough as a country had led to the creation of the National Defense Education Act of 1957, which had forced a curriculum change in schools nationwide to integrate STEM programs into most students’ lives. The students who were seen to easily catch hold of these ideas were put into STEM programs where they can further develop their ideas and knowledge in these areas to help further technological advancements in the United States (Steeves et al., 2009).
This gave rise to not only higher STEM education but also the rise to NASA (Steeves et al., 2009), which in turn created an increase in scholars working in engineering and physics fields in the United States. The introduction of NASA had not only created many more educational areas implemented in school curriculum, but had created more careers and job opportunities in the STEM field. The necessity of new innovations and technologies had inspired many children to follow these paths and want to develop and create new ideas of their own, which created a major rise of graduates in STEM fields.
This huge STEM boom didn’t stop after a few years, but instead continued to grow over the next few decades as technology has continued to advance. More and more students continue to go into higher education and graduate with a degree in some type of STEM field, and this number continues to grow as time passes on. The only issue, though, is where are these new graduates going to get jobs?
The United States and many companies with too much influence and power would continue to promote the idea that there aren’t enough STEM graduates and employees for the workforce but this couldn’t be any farther from the truth (Salzman, 2013). In fact, that boom in STEM graduates has given rise to more unemployed STEM graduates than employed due to the increasing number of STEM workers in the country (Salzman, 2013). Hal Salzman, a professor Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University, has researched into the topic of STEM graduates and available careers, and has found that there is no shortage of graduates or workers, but rather the jobs themselves.
Many factors can play into why these companies continue to spread the word of needing more STEM workers, and a few of these reasons may be because many fields of STEM are easier and more cost-effective for colleges and universities to teach (Hemelt et al., 2021), and there isn’t enough new innovation coming from STEM.
But what do I mean there isn’t enough new innovation from STEM? As important and valuable as STEM is, there is always room for improvement, and one way that’s recently been implemented is STEAM — science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics.
Through the research of professors David Aguilera and Jairo Ortiz-Revilla Burgos from the University of Spain, they have assessed the major differentiation between STEM and STEAM, and it is primarily the implementation of the humanities while still following the basis of STEM foundations and thinking. Through the artistic implementation of humanities, people can find “the resolution of real problems… to create personal meaning; and… for self-motivation.”
At first glance, it seems almost impossible to incorporate arts into such a rigid framework such as the fields of sciences, but this is something that has been in practice for as long as digital design has been a concept. Video games are one of the primary examples for the usage of STEAM, as it not only incorporates computer programming and engineering but also an inclusion of artwork and storytelling, both of which are artforms in themselves.
Psychology is another degree that could be considered a STEAM career, but ever so slightly. I asked some of my friends, primarily those who are in STEM majors currently, and my roommate and friend Mattie Wilson referred to psychology as a “soft science,” which is a term I couldn’t agree more with. When checking the UCSC undergraduate degrees page, it is said that psychology is a science, yet it primarily focuses on human issues and problems rather than an in-depth analysis on human biology and brain function. This is the big difference between cognitive science and psychology being in STEM and STEAM — cognitive science is on the brain activity and how that makes a person act, yet psychology is on how people’s environments have affected their brain activity and how human influence can change their brain chemistry.
The inclusion of arts in STEAM is supposed to promote more creative and critical thinking from children in schools (Aguilera & Ortiz-Revilla, 2021) but many schools that have tried to include this curriculum have massively failed on incorporating the arts and humanities aspect into these classes due to the inflexibility many schools have when it comes to changing curriculums (Sanz-Camarero et al., 2023). But with the small amount of research done when arts are better integrated into the curriculum, studies have shown that children do develop much higher critical thinking skills and begin developing interdisciplinary practices from younger ages (Perignat & Katz-Buonincontro, 2019).
References:
Mattie Wilson, 6–6–2024, Interview
Aguilera, D., & Ortiz-Revilla, J. (2021). STEM vs. STEAM Education and Student Creativity: A Systematic Literature Review. Education Sciences, 11(7), 331-. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci11070331
Hemelt, S. W., Stange, K. M., Furquim, F., Simon, A., & Sawyer, J. E. (2021). Why Is Math Cheaper than English? Understanding Cost Differences in Higher Education. Journal of Labor Economics, 39(2), 397–435. https://doi.org/10.1086/709535
Perignat, E., & Katz-Buonincontro, J. (2019). STEAM in practice and research: An integrative literature review. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 31, 31–43. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tsc.2018.10.002
Salzman, H. (2013). What Shortages? The Real Evidence About the STEM Workforce. Issues in Science and Technology, 29(4), 58–67. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43315795
Sanz-Camarero, R., Ortiz-Revilla, J., & Greca, I. M. (2023). The Impact of Integrated STEAM Education on Arts Education: A Systematic Review. Education Sciences, 13(11), 1139-. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci13111139
Steeves, K. A., Bernhardt, P. E., Burns, J. P. ., & Lombard, M. K. (2009). Transforming American Educational Identity After Sputnik. American Educational History Journal, 36(1/2), 71–87. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=shib&db=eue&AN=44459581&site=ehost-live.
Undergraduate Degrees. (n.d.). Retrieved June 6, 2024, from https://psychology.ucsc.edu/undergraduate/index.html