Uh Oh. There is no H in STEAM.

Tag it as you like – epiphany, eureka, aha moment, duh, or other – there is no ‘H’ in ‘STEAM’, obviously. If you're human, that could be a problem!

Without getting overly academic or ridiculously technical, this commentary is more of my thinking aloud about the 'things' that weave strands throughout my varied interests and happenstance encounters in hopes of catalyzing curious investigation. I've always been interested in science and intrigued by education, in every sense of both broad terms. The culmination of my mother's creative artistry and my father's brilliant logic, it's not really surprising that my Australian dissertation focused on technology-enriched science learning environments. What is surprising to me is that, over the course of some 30+ years at a leading university, I [Rebekah K Nix, PhD] managed to happily transition from the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics (from which I earned my bachelors and masters degrees) over into the School of Interdisciplinary Studies, and eventually to the School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication (partly). Many other roots run deep there too. Later, as faculty and staff, I enjoyed working with many of my professors across these three distinct fields and now call several good friends.

But back to my point and explaining the odd title of this whatever it is...

From pre-K through post-doc, educators joke about the 'alphabet soup' of acronyms and mnemonic labels that make pedagogical conversations almost unintelligible. Even within tight circles there can be multiple definitions that often lead to well-intentioned misunderstandings. Social media and online learning have certainly added to the litany. However, even beyond the institutional bounds, most leaders and learners know what STEM means: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. It's almost all you see in the news about education (and employment and legislation and funding and so on) these days. Literally and figuratively positioned at the opposite edge of my campus, A&H is how we refer to the School of Arts and Humanities. A fairly recent outgrowth of A&H, ATEC (the School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication) straddles domains, nestled away in a shiny new building with all sorts of 'toys', aka 'educational technologies'. I am truly honored to know my way around each, even though much is new and I've only scratched the surface of so many exciting topics.

The clever notion of 'STEAM' and its many variations (worth Googling) is how folks describe the impassioned initiatives to integrate Art – the A – into STEM. I'll try to explain why I think we need to include Humanities – the H of A&H – as well.

In retrospect, this idea makes perfect sense to me. I remain appreciative that I attended a 'liberal arts' high school. I knew that I was not likely to ever take an influential amount of non-STEM courses once I started my advanced studies. And my parents made it a point to keep me 'well-rounded'. I was raised under the never-excepted rule that one should try everything (legal) once, including, much to my dismay, sardines. As different as my parents were, they both agreed on this so I was exposed to a wide variety of people and places and things. We didn't categorize anything as STEM or A&H as we recognized each in the other and vice versa. If I had known about the School of Interdisciplinary Studies, I’d probably be somewhere else right now as I might have designed my own degree so that I wouldn’t have had to choose between A&H or STEM back in the day. Even though it’s relegated to academic silos in most cases, the on-going movement toward 'convergence' research with its transdisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and multidisciplinarity reflects this ubiquity – and opens the door to new ways of thinking and doing in our well-connected world.

Now outside of 'the academy', I am able to look at the 'busy-ness' of education with a fresh perspective. Focused on educational applications of an enabling knowledge discovery platform, I had an epiphany, eureka, aha moment regarding how most folks are trying to effect the STEM to STEAM shift. As we are daily confronted with the real-life 'sci-fi' decisions of artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, my colleague and I realized that MOHO (the software we're investigating) relies on continuous human intervention. That's what makes it unique. In fact, it depends on human intuition and individual experience to deliver the best results! That's what got me to thinking about other areas in which we are yielding our human essence.

Coming back to the STEM to STEAM versus A&H issue, instead of inserting an A into STEM, why don't we pull STEM into A&H (Arts AND Humanities)? As with everything else, in the accountable classroom, some educators integrate tools, techniques, and topics better than others.

Mechanically, it’s not that big of a deal. In fact, a highly successful, international peer-reviewed journal, called Leonardo, has been documenting the use of science and technology in the arts and music for over 50 years. From the website, "Leonardo/The International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology (Leonardo/ISAST) is a nonprofit organization that serves the global network of distinguished scholars, artists, scientists, researchers and thinkers through our programs, which focus on interdisciplinary work, creative output and innovation." That introduces another M (music) along with the A, S, and T. Moving forward, Leonardo is increasingly focusing on “the application and influence of the arts and humanities on science and technology". That adds the H!

Visual, semantic, and computational tools and techniques are being used in most every arena of various 'schools' of thought. Maybe, for those of us who live, work, and think outside of the Leonardo community, it’s hard to bridge the gaps because of how enabling technologies 'emerge'. Most are created by engineers who often don't know why anyone would use them! Today's 'big data' methods are changing the ways in which we assess and evaluate academic, scientific, and philosophical studies. There's a lot to learn from each application. For example, when we added MOHO (that knowledge discovery platform we're investigating) to the toolbox for graduate researchers in ATEC, they each were able to search differently (use digital resources more effectively in the process of knowledge discovery) to form more nuanced questions about their research interests – with little or no training. Yay! In a practical way, MOHO’s iterative discovery process enabled these expert searchers to delve into the relationships among concepts that were returned and make connections based on their own existing knowledge, to continuously drive the focus of the MOHO knowledge discovery process rather than needing to rely on the AI (artificial intelligence) process alone.

HOWEVER, in terms of the dynamics of thinking differently about search and research, it’s a whole ‘other ball game’. As you’re probably well-aware, artists don’t typically think like engineers and engineers think very differently from artists usually. Even though this A&H professor didn’t teach like he was taught, when his graduate students were presented with MOHO to come up with novel approaches to the study of a complex body of literature with which they were not very familiar, they didn’t know what to make of the results. Granted, one cannot make a direct comparison to these two cases as there are numerous variables, but the point I’m hoping to make is that transforming any data and information into knowledge and wisdom requires ‘the H’. Technology and theory do not effect change; people do. Particularly in academia, when I think about the future of research, ‘big data’ is like the donut and what we seek is really the spherical ‘hole’. I want to ‘fill in’ those missing elements to paint a more complete, exponentially more meaningful, even bigger picture that links to the reality around me right now.

Innovative applications of enabling technologies, like MOHO, offer infinite ways to leverage the benefits of machine-reading, multiple other forms of AI, and whatever is yet to come, WITHOUT conceding human control of the discovery process. Interjecting human inferential learning (analog decision-making) into the digital tradition of discrete decision-making delivers the best of both worlds as an integrated culture. We should empower searchers to draw from and to build on their unique individual knowledge bases and to explore gradual changes around connections that can take them a little further down the way. That’s the joy of learning (and teaching) that we’ve buried in the unnecessarily overwhelming complexity of the current educational system.

My quest is to promote the development of 'information artisans' (IAs) who appreciate and crave the joy of discovery. Both learners and leaders must be encouraged to exercise playfulness, ingenuity, and creativity. Always a matter of context, ‘play’ is the free spirit of exploration, doing and being for its own pure joy. Technique is acquired by “the practice of practice, by persistently experimenting and playing with our tools and testing their limits and resistances” (Nachmanovitch, 1990, p. 42). With more experience and shared expertise, I expect that we will eventually return to the 'basics' of life-long learning – where there are no boundaries and ‘learning’ is simply learning (without any qualifiers like S, T, R, E, A, M, or even H). Such (r)evolutionary change takes time, typically on a geologic scale it seems. Existing and emerging open solutions should organically lead to integrated problem-solving. If we 'flipped' the common curricular ‘STEM-to-STEAM’ model, perhaps A&H+STEM (or STEM+A&H, if you’re so inclined) would leapfrog us to the next level of cultural creativity at a rate of change in academia that’s closer to that of today’s rapid technology advances. 

Just sayin', “AH, STEM, I can have it all!”