The Iterative Process — An Alternative View of What “STEAM Education” Means

About a year or so ago, I was sitting with a colleague who was like, “I don’t get the point of putting the Arts with the rest of STEM — it has nothing to do with it. The people in the Arts programs just want to give their programs more credence.” In short, she felt that combining the Arts with STEM muddles the focus on STEM learning — it reinforced the “kitchen sink” approach to education, where the more disparate elements you can bring into a lesson, clearly the better the lesson is. She didn’t buy it.

I got her point. And I don’t blame her.

Unfortunately, I think many science teachers are in the same boat — the constant lumping of Common Core standards into what used to be a perfectly good science lesson — oftentimes, it feels like the TV show “Chopped”, where contestants strive to make something edible out of three ingredients that have no business being together. Mixing the Arts with Science? Are you putting your chocolate in my peanut butter, or is my peanut butter in your chocolate?

The problem with STEAM is that it’s not being sold correctly at all. Let’s play the “Warmer…” game to display the best way to sell it:

“Freezing cold”: STEAM is about the connecting of content. To “add Art + Design to the equation” sounds like “more content” to a teacher, and will not work. Plus, it’s missing the boat.

“Getting warmer”: It is not really about the marrying of skills, or the end product — the “art” in a bridge design, or the “science” behind an architectural piece. Though “Engineering and technology can certainly serve the artist and help create art”, this starts to fall apart when finding consilience between science and more affective art forms, like writing or dance. Shoehorning a connection between these will only serve to disillusion teachers.

“Warmer still”: It’s not even about the “likeness of the creative acts of the mind in art and science”, like Jacob Bronowski mentions. Focusing on the beginning is great, but won’t sustain a true STEAM project through to the end.

“HOT!”: What will sell STEAM is not the curricular underpinnings, not the creative aspect, not the product. It is the iterative process.

“Iteration” is a word that seems to be making its way through the STEAM fields, but finding it in relation to STEAM education itself is like finding a needle in a haystack. I don’t know why. RISD’s president seems aware that this is a big deal in STEAM education… not much else out there.

And that’s the frustrating thing, coming from someone who believes in the STEAM movement: this wholly universal way of doing things is not what is gone to first as the single biggest reason for imagining STEAM.

Iteration is essentially the act of repeating what you just did, but this time slightly differently, based on the results of the first time. The idea is that the results from last time have informed you of how you were successful and how you failed, so that the next iteration will be done with the benefit of that new information.

The iterative process can be seen a STEAM level — the process of “tweaking” an experimental procedure, an engineering prototype, revising/editing a paper, erasing/redrawing a picture. Indeed, the phrase was probably first used in mathematics, when data is fed into functions over and over again to see the patterns of numbers that evolve — fractals are made this way.

The exciting thing, though, is not that it connects the disciplines, but it is in fact an umbrella process that all productive work goes through. Nothing that is done, in school, or in life, that produces anything doesn’t go through this process. All things are made, then assessed. If they don’t work, then it’s back to the drawing board for another iteration until it does work to someone’s satisfaction.

Inherent in this is that there is a mechanism for testing whether a product works. In engineering, that’s easy — the bridge either holds the weight, or it crumbles. In writing, it’s typically not done that way, much to the detriment of the writing. Students typically go through revisions of their essays without ever “testing” them to see if they “work” — therefore the revisions often take a robotic, hoop-jumping feel to them. Imagine a writing assignment where the product had to “work” in some way? You may get the same buy-in as the bridge project!

Forget writing — imagine a school where all classes focused on students’ deliverance of products that work. That has a decidedly PBL feel to it, doesn’t it? And the process that accomplishes that is iterative in nature.

Just like that, we’ve gone beyond STEAM education, but kept true to it’s reason for being at the same time. And so I propose that STEAM education focus on the iterative aspect as the one that binds itself and all other disciplines together. And with that, “STEM” schools, “STEAM” schools — hell, every school — lose the idea of disciplines all separately trying to achieve results, and adopt the idea that we’re all in this together, linked by a common bond of iterative experience that could serve to galvanize the silos of education. Forget STEM schools, STEAM schools; it’s ITERATIVE schools that we need! In doing so, we may find a buy-in for STEAM that eclipses what is currently happening — and just may find it ends up being the glue that binds all.