A NEW STEAM AGE: TOWARDS ONE CULTURE FOR LEARNING SCIENCE

Abstract

In many cultures learning has been organised around subject disciplines broadly conceived as the Arts, Humanities and Sciences. Subject disciplines of the curriculum have evolved structures and characteristics creating boundaries between them that are counter to the experiences of many adolescents, who rarely meet such borders in their daily lives. Disciplinary borders favour a utilitarian view of knowledge and creativity, often under-valuing some disciplines, including the creative and performing arts, not directly associated with primary means of economic production. The borders between self-reinforcing disciplinary structures result in inadequate attention paid to the potential of working across, between and beyond disciplines. In this paper I examine how this schism between the ‘Arts’ and ‘Sciences’ has come about and the potential harm it continues to do. An example from the history of science, the case of Darwin’s changing relationship with the two cultures, is used to promote the benefits of more creative approaches to teaching science in a new project, ‘Darwin Inspired Learning’. The benefits to learning science using methods from one of the Arts, drama, are shown. The argument is made for ‘STEAM’, showing how education in the 21st Century is moving away from a restricted notion of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) to one that encompasses the Arts (Science, Technology, Engineering, ARTS and Mathematics). STEAM promotes economic development, encouraging people to work creatively to generate and communicate ground breaking new ideas. It is argued that teaching methods and content from arts subjects should be used to promote a more engaging and cognitively challenging experience of science education at a time when poor pupil attitudes to studying science subjects continues to be an issue in many countries.