Recently, I observed a high school science class where students created a play to highlight the different parts of an animal cell. The teacher mentioned that she chose this lesson as a way to integrate the arts into science. By the end of the class, it was apparent that the students did not understand the relationships between the parts of the cell. And, I wondered whether they had learned much about how to create a play. "STEAM" lessons such as this are playing out daily in classrooms across the nation and may only increase in frequency in the coming years.
Under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), federal education policy shifts its focus from "core academic subjects" toward a "well-rounded education" (Walker, 2016). ESSA explicitly allows for arts education to be a component of a "well-rounded education," a welcome change for many education leaders. But the law also emphasizes career readiness and workforce development, both of which were central under No Child Left Behind, ESSA's predecessor. Changes in the labor market requiring STEM knowledge will continue, sustaining the focus on these subjects in K–12 schools.
Taking these components of ESSA together, I anticipate that a surge of education leaders will promote STEAM lessons, and many will look into the creation of full-scale STEAM programs. On the surface, this seems like a natural fit and a great way to accomplish two goals—inclusion of arts and emphasis on STEM. Many education leaders agree that "the inclusion of the arts component into STEM makes it more fun to learn, and more approachable to kids" (Vidcode, 2016) and that art "can serve as an on-ramp to STEM for underrepresented students" (Jolly, 2014). According to this thinking, students interested in art will be motivated to learn STEM subjects, art makes STEM more fun, and art can be used to make STEM more attractive to female students, students of color, and students from low socioeconomic backgrounds, all of whom are underrepresented in STEM fields.
As a professor of science education at the University of Alabama and a former high school science teacher in Texas and Florida, I take a different stand on this issue. I fundamentally believe both STEM and art are important components of a well-rounded education. At the same time, I question whether the best route to teaching them is through a STEAM approach. As University of Arkansas professor Jay Greene (2017) writes, this combination of disciplines is "almost certainly counterproductive as well as pedagogically unsound." In other words, without careful consideration, STEAM can lead to less-robust learning experiences for students in STEM and art.
Philosophical Differences
y main concern with STEAM comes from the inherent philosophical differences between STEM and art, the most important being how each set of disciplines establishes a body of knowledge. In STEM, the veracity of knowledge claims—facts, theorems, and laws—are subject to scrutiny from the broader disciplinary community. New scientific claims or mathematical proofs must go through an objective peer-review process prior to publication and all knowledge claims are open to revision in light of new evidence or ideas. As an example, Albert Einstein published his theory of special relativity, which incorporates the equation E=mc2, in a pair of papers in 1905. When he won the 1921 Physics Nobel Prize, special relativity was not mentioned as one of his contributions to science. This was because the larger scientific community had yet to find sufficient evidentiary support for the claims he made, and as such, special relativity had yet to be verified.
By contrast, in art, as the saying goes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. That is, the aesthetic quality of an artistic work (such as a painting or poem) is a subjective judgement that cannot be supported or refuted by appealing to an objective set of criteria or measured using a scale. For example, many people would agree that the Mona Lisa is the greatest painting of all time. Yet, it is equally valid to claim Guernica is the greatest painting because of the emotional reaction one has to Guernica. Or, in performing arts, I (along with many others) would suggest that Bruce Springsteen is the greatest live performer in music history. A fan of the Rolling Stones, on the other hand, is equally valid to claim that the Stones put on the best live shows.
This distinction is important because students' learning of STEM and art includes understanding of how claims in the field are established. When art and STEM are combined into STEAM, there is the potential to use one set of criteria to evaluate aspects of the other. When judging the efficacy of a design solution as part of an engineering task, for example, there might be a tendency to evaluate the solution based upon its aesthetic qualities. While engineers do hope their designs are visually pleasing, aesthetic concerns take a back seat to the degree to which the design meets the needs and constraints of the problem. And the degree to which the design meets the needs and constraints is objectively measured—if a bridge must hold the weight of 1,000 cars, the ability to hold 1,000 cars is the primary criteria on which to judge the bridge. Conversely, when students are asked to make a sculpture, for example, there is typically no objective criteria to judge its aesthetic value (i.e., there is not a metric to measure the quality of the sculpture). Instead, students should seek to identify the aesthetic, emotional experience that arises from viewing artistic creations.
The Practices of Art and STEM
My second concern is that there is a tendency in STEAM to rely on practices from one discipline while learning about the other discipline. By practices, I mean those things that professionals in the field do, like planning and carrying out an investigation in science or publicly displaying creative artwork. Current standards documents in STEM and art, such as the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics, the Next Generation Science Standards, and the National Core Arts Standards, include disciplinary practices as essential components of a student's K–12 education. This is because it is important for students to not only learn about the products of a discipline (such as scientific laws, mathematical theorems, or works of art) but to appreciate how those products are developed. However, when students learn the content for one discipline through the practices of another discipline, they may fail to make connections between the practices and products of a field.
One example of this is having students in a math class create a "Pi skyline," where students make a bar graph with each digit of Pi corresponding to the height of each bar (see fig. 1). Students are often encouraged to choose colors that are personally meaningful or to think about why people like pictures of skylines of various cities (part of the disciplinary art practice of "connecting"). Often absent from this lesson is a connection to mathematical understandings of Pi, such as the relationship between the circumference and diameter of a circle or the numerous ways to represent Pi (3.1415 …; 22/7; 4/1-4/3+4/5-4/7+4/9; and so on). Most importantly, students are not asked to participate in mathematical practices when making the Pi skyline, like making sense of a mathematical problem or looking for patterns. Instead, they are engaged in artistic practices during math class, thereby cheapening both the mathematical learning and the appreciation of the artistic practice.
Deficit Views Associated with STEAM
My third concern with STEAM is that often it is associated with a deficit view of certain groups of students. Earlier, I quoted Jolly (2014), who says that STEAM "can serve as an on-ramp to STEM for underrepresented students." Underrepresented groups in STEM include female, African-American, and Latino students, among others. Though well-meaning, the implication of these sentiments is that white, male students have a natural interest in or aptitude for STEM, while these other students need an "on-ramp" to understanding and appreciating STEM. This also implies that the arts are somehow less rigorous than STEM fields—that all students can learn about and through art, but not all students can handle the rigors of STEM. I fundamentally disagree with this notion.
Instead, I agree with Neil deGrasse Tyson (2013) who says, "Kids are born curious. Period." By this, Tyson means that all children, regardless of gender, ethnicity, nationality, or socioeconomic status are born interested in understanding how the natural world works. While Tyson is speaking mainly about science, I extend his thought to all STEM fields. How many parents and teachers have been asked by a child, "How does an airplane fly?" To fully answer the question, one must understand physics, mathematics, engineering, and computer science.
Furthermore, I do not believe that this curiosity diminishes over time. Instead, students are underrepresented in STEM fields because too often, they receive a message that they are not capable of understanding STEM concepts or that they first require a less rigorous, watered-down introduction to STEM knowledge.
The Utilitarian View of Art Education
My final concern with STEAM is that treating arts as an on-ramp to STEM also promotes a utilitarian view of art—that art benefits students because it can increase interest in STEM and help underrepresented students learn STEM concepts. Absent this view is the idea that art has an intrinsic value unto itself.
I believe students should appreciate the arts because of the emotional impact and insight into the human condition that art conveys. As an example, many students read William Golding's The Lord of the Flies as part of their high school curriculum. The reason this book has a continued presence in high schools is not because of its value relative to the STEM fields—it neither will help students learn STEM concepts nor will it increase the likelihood they pursue STEM careers. Instead, students read The Lord of the Flies because of the philosophical insights it provides into universal human struggles, such as the downside to group-think and the effort required to maintain social structure and justice. Art should be included in a well-rounded education precisely because art provides a set of experiences, ideas, and knowledge for students that STEM cannot.
STEM and Art in a Well-Rounded Education
Given these concerns about STEAM, how can education leaders include both STEM and art as part of the "well-rounded education" required by ESSA?
First, students should be engaged in authentic disciplinary practices in ways that honor the purpose of those practices. In STEM, this means engaging in practices like analyzing data or creating models in order to understand the world and to make reliable predictions about future events. In the arts, this means producing an artistic work that conveys meaning or consuming an artistic work while connecting the work to one's personal experiences.
Second, students should be asked to think about the philosophical underpinnings of STEM and the arts, along with their subfields. This gives students an appreciation of the relationship of the practices to the broader purposes of STEM and art. And it allows them to see beyond surface features of the practices and to understand how each practice is interwoven with the other disciplinary practices and the broader understandings provided by the STEM and art fields, respectively. For example, both Georgia O'Keeffe and Charles Darwin made drawings of plants, animals, and landscapes during their careers. Yet, the purposes behind them are different. Darwin's drawings were created as part of his scientific work and arose out of a need to share his findings and support his claims about how the natural world works. O'Keeffe's "simplified and refined representations of [New Mexico] express a deep personal response to the high desert terrain" (Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, 2018). It would be equally misguided to state that O'Keeffe was attempting to create generalizable knowledge claims about the geology of the American Southwest as it would be to claim that Darwin was expressing a personal connection to the Galapagos finches.
Third, when incorporating literacy skills into STEM, students should engage in authentic uses of disciplinary literacy skills. All STEM subjects rely on literacy skills to communicate ideas, share new findings, and respond to the arguments of others. When incorporating literacy skills into STEM, it is these skills that should be the focus—students should share the results of a scientific investigation via a written report and provide feedback to classmates through a peer-review process. This is distinct from a potential approach in STEAM where students write about STEM subjects disconnected from STEM knowledge, such as students writing a fictional story about their favorite number.
Fourth, when incorporating science into the arts, students should similarly be asked to think about the role that STEM is playing in their work of art. That is, many artists take inspiration from STEM fields (author Michael Crichton is a prime example), but their primary goal is the creation of a work of art, not the creation of knowledge regarding how the natural or engineered world works. Furthermore, they are engaged in the practices of art and not the practices of science. Thus, it should be made clear to students that they are using science for inspiration, but that they are doing art for artistic purposes.
Authentic Representation
In thinking back to the lesson asking students to create a play about the parts of an animal cell, I sympathize with the teacher, who wanted to instill in her students an appreciation for both art and science. At the same time, I sympathize with her students who, unfortunately, did not seem to develop an appreciation for either. How many students are turned off from both fields because they have not been presented with an authentic representation of what it means to be a scientist or a playwright? To create the conditions for all students to succeed in STEM and art—and for students to know what it means to be an artist, scientist, or mathematician—education leaders must ensure authentic representation of the STEM and artistic fields in classrooms.
