Abstract
Urgent calls across industries for a workforce with creative, innovative thinking and problem-solving skills demand that educators rethink teaching and learning at every level, from early childhood to higher education. These calls are particularly critical in preparing students for the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), in which there is a growing demand for professionals who demonstrate skills that extend far beyond content expertise. Integrating arts into STEM can, we suggest, promote these twenty-first-century skills and insights, and a Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM) perspective may link students to more innovative career trajectories. In this chapter, we offer examples showing how educators that are teaching content with and through the arts are, in fact, teaching creative thinking. Our recent research suggests that using the arts as a pedagogical tool can enhance creative thinking and problem-solving skills. From randomized control trials that tested the effects of arts-integrated science units compared to conventionally taught units, we found that learning science through the arts produces better long-term memory for science than conventional teaching strategies, especially for students with lower reading skills. We consider how the arts promotes better memory for content and how this pedagogical tool fosters creative thinking, thus reducing the gap between higher- and lower-achieving students.
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Hardiman, M.M., JohnBull, R.M. (2019). From STEM to STEAM: How Can Educators Meet the Challenge?. In: Stewart, A.J., Mueller, M.P., Tippins, D.J. (eds) Converting STEM into STEAM Programs. Environmental Discourses in Science Education, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25101-7_1
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