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!”