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In this issue:
From STEM to STEAM: Adding the Arts
Q and A with ‘20 to Watch’ member Cheryl Capozzoli
From STEM to STEAM: Adding the Arts
By Naomi Dillon
“Disconnect” is one of the most commonly uttered refrains in the discourse about what’s wrong with the U.S. public school system. Students are bored by today’s curriculum, schools are out of sync with today’s job market, and the existing talent pool is ill-equipped to compete on a global scale.
To face these multi-pronged challenges, many education reformers and pundits have pointed to science, technology, engineering, and math as the fields that will help America maintain its position as an economic and intellectual force to be reckoned with.
The focus on these disciplines, known as STEM, has spawned a plethora of magnet schools, national conferences, and federal programs.
In practice and in research, however, a growing number of educators are coming to the conclusion that something is missing from this acronym, which is to say something is missing in the way we educate and train the next generation of workers.
“We hear a lot from businesses saying ‘Kids are coming out [of school] unprepared, they don’t know how to work in teams, they aren’t creative, they don’t know how to think critically,’” says Georgette Yakman, who discovered a different way to think and connect education’s most critical lessons.
While a graduate student at Virginia Polytechnic and State University’s Integrated Science-Technology-Engineering-Mathematics Educational program (ISTEMed), Yakman embarked on an extensive research project to figure out how the American public school system got to where it’s at and how STEM came to be its roadmap to the future.
“I was trying to figure out how the subjects fit together and I had this incredible a-ha moment,” Yakman says. “I found not just a way for these subjects to physically interact with another and be cross-taught, but how all the disciplines support each other.”
She called this approach of adding arts to the curriculum STEAM.
“The magic sentence is science and technology interpreted through engineering and arts all through mathematical elements; those are active ways at looking at what we have to create a new world. That is STEAM, as I see it,” says Yakman. She has slowly pushed this holistic model of education through papers, presentations, and a fledgling consulting firm.
Rather than being at the center of a major reform movement, however, arts is often marginalized and shut out of key initiatives and discussions on building a world class education system.
That’s a big mistake, says Jim Brazell, a technology forecaster, strategist, and public speaker who has spent much of his career speculating about the next big thing in industry and society.
“The first thing people are missing when it comes to the arts in the world is that arts are a huge component of our wealth creation,” Brazell says, noting that U.S. creative industries, which includes the software, film, and publishing, as well as architects, advertisers, and designers, accounted for more than 6.4 percent of the country’s gross domestic product in 2007.
“There’s real wealth here, but if you go into schools today they are cutting the arts,” Brazell says. “Creativity is not a department down the hallway. Our ability to create, make, and design is what makes us human … and it’s what will make us prosper.”
While a focus on the STEM fields makes sense as digital literacy has become a required skill for all jobs, along with higher math and reading skills, schools do the next generation of learners a disservice by excluding the arts.
“You can look at arts in different ways; as a discipline, as a commercial sector, as a philosophy, but it’s also an economic model,” Brazell says. “We are shifting from a classical economic model of creating products to creating ideas. What we’re talking about is the ability to innovate and be creative.”
And arts are the conduit, the glue, the agent through which all great ideas begin and end.
“The problem is we want to break arts down rather thinking about the connections,” Brazell says. “Many European and Asian countries don’t make the distinctions we do here; they don’t draw the line where we do. In England, they have the foundation for the science and arts.
Consciously and unconsciously, however, the silos between science and art seem to be softening in the U.S. as well.
The National Science Foundation has hosted and funded a number of recent conferences and workshops, including last year’s “Bridging STEM to STEAM: Developing New Frameworks for Art-Science-Design Pedagogy,” which brought together top scientists, artists, IT experts and educators at the Rhode Island School of Design to develop ways to support these interdisciplinary connections.
While it may not be explicitly stated, such linkages are being made at Kentucky’s Jefferson County Public Schools, which was a host site for a 2011 TLN Education Technology site visit and a former TLN Salute District.
“We don’t say anything that says this is specific to STEAM,” says Sharon Shrout, the director of computer education support. “But anytime, kids are creating regardless of which tools they use, there is an arts element to it.”
That can be seen in a number of programs and classroom activities that proliferate throughout the district.
Each spring, for instance, fifth-graders at Chenoweth Elementary complete a six week multi-media project culminating in the Chenoweth Film Festival. Students choose their film’s subject from a list of core content topics including everything from the water cycle to alliteration to fractions.
Students are responsible for everything that has to do with their film including researching, writing, filming, acting, and promotion. They also create their own movie posters and their soundtrack using Microsoft software and MIDI technology.
“It honors the different talents that kids bring to the team,” Shrout says. “It really helps to build the whole 21st century student because it’s that whole child and that whole education that we want to serve.”
Naomi Dillon (ndillon@nsba.org) is a senior editor of American School Board Journal.
Q and A with ‘20 to Watch’ member Cheryl Capozzoli
Cheryl Capozzoli is an open source -- literally. Much like the methodology and philosophy behind Wikipedia, Mozilla Firefox and other user-centered and generated creations, Capozzoli is a true believer in the power of opening the development process -- in this case, education -- to everyone.
As an education consultant, instructional technology specialist with Pennsylvania’s Capital Area Intermediate Unit, and founder of the Wiki, Web 2.0 Guru, Capozzoli devotes her time to providing professional development and sharing best practices in education technology, which she began delving into in the early 1990s, when she began as an elementary school teacher.
Capozzoli’s enthusiasm for infusing technology into instruction has earned her numerous accolades, including a spot among last year’s “20 to Watch,” an NSBA recognition program that pinpoints emerging leaders poised to do great things in education technology. In Capozzoli’s case, however, the title is simple affirmation.
After successfully earning a seat on Pennsylvania’s Newport School Board in 2009, Capozzoli has worked tirelessly to ensure all children have equal access to education resources, including technology, and has personally provided training and professional development to teachers for free. “To be a change agent, you have to be right there with them,” Capozzoli explains.
ASBJSenior Editor Naomi Dillon caught up with the energetic Capozzoli for an invigorating chat about what keeps her wired.
So how did you become the Web 2.0 Guru?
When I was doing the coaching position, I would send out emails to colleagues and say, “Hey I found this neat thing and thought you’d find it useful.” Later, I’d see them in the hallway and they’d tell me they got my e-mail and would look at it later, which meant they’d never look at it again and so, I said, “let me put all these resources someplace.” People were calling me guru anyway, so I said why not run with it. The interesting thing about the site is it’s reflection of what I was into at the moment, and how I’ve evolved. First it was about providing resources, then it was tools, then it was about building leadership capacity.
Education technology is a broad field. What’s your interpretation of it?
Education technology needs to build higher order thinking. It needs to reinforce concepts, objectives, and learning standards. It has to have some kind of hook. It can’t just be ‘Here’s technology, let’s use it’ because sometimes technology isn’t always the right choice. Some kids want to hold a pencil; they want to draw on a piece of paper. In this way, technology is really about providing students autonomy in the classroom, giving them a choice in how they want to learn and how they want to demonstrate what they know.
We hear a lot about putting students in the driver’s seat of their learning. How can technology help with that?
Students are digital natives but they’re native to social gaming and entertainment. They don’t know how to use it for learning. Our job is to show them how to use it in their academic path. It can be fun at the same time, but this is how you learn, too. Challenges are the story of life, and yet, we don’t teach that in our classrooms. Just because it’s a challenge and you don’t understand it, shouldn’t stop you dead in your tracks. You should go research and find out how to do it. Unfortunately, we’re still in the sit-and-get mode in our classrooms.
What would you say are other big obstacles to education technology?
Sometimes that the focus in grant or technology initiatives is more about the technology, when it really shouldn’t be. Education technology is really about a change in practice, a change in our approach to teaching and learning. But school systems too often rely on a business model approach rather than instructional design approach.
What do you mean by an instructional design approach?
When adopting any instructional design approach, you have to pilot, you have to plan. Instead, schools when they see something they like, they say, ‘Oh let’s get it’ and they don’t plan, they don’t test it out, then there’s all these issues and it fails in the implementation. There are no silver bullets, even with technology. Districts need to first have a discussion about what their vision for the future is, what their goals are, who are the stakeholders and get everybody on the same page and move together. There’s not a consistent effort on what we need to be doing for our kids.
You make it sound so easy, but it’s not, is it?
As a mentor once said to me, it’s all about building relationships and building that trust. It’s easier to move forward as a whole group. But it’s hard to move as group when there are different mindsets. A fixed mindset stays stuck in a negative mode. People feel threatened, and they don’t want to move because it’s scary. A growth mindset sees a challenge and gets excited about and says, ‘Let’s go; we’ll be stronger because of it.’
The winners of the 2011-12 20 to Watch will be announced in March. Watch for updates on School Board News Today at http://schoolboardnews.nsba.org.
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