Abstract
Humanity is at a critical juncture where the concept of sustainability can no longer be relegated to armchair discussions or wishful thinking. The hour is late, and it is not enough for us to mitigate the negative impacts we have on the world. We need to embrace sustainability as a core value of human civilization and a necessary part of our everyday lives—we need to move toward a sustainable world. The role of STEAM in this endeavor is crucial to help younger generations avoid the anchors of history and habit that hindered their predecessors from accepting sustainability as a core value. In this chapter, we at Engineers for a Sustainable World share our idea of a sustainable world and of how a well-rounded STEAM approach can better equip engineers in particular and people from other professions in general to contribute to such a world. In particular, we believe that incorporating the arts into an engineering education and out-of-classroom initiatives will help inculcate the kind of creative and holistic thinking required to deal with the multi-faceted challenges of a sustainable world. To exemplify this, we discuss two of our important local projects—the Berkeley Vertical Garden and the Undocu-Wall—where artistic design was a key component of the initiatives, to their benefit.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Bejan, A. (2016). The physics of life: The evolution of everything. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Boy, G. A. (2013). From STEM to STEAM: Toward a human-centered education, creativity & learning thinking. In Proceedings of the 31st European conference on cognitive ergonomics (p. 3). ACM.
Dernbach, J. C., & Mintz, J. A. (2011). Environmental laws and sustainability: An introduction.
Feldman, A. (2015). http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/06/steam_vs_stem_why_we_need_to_put_the_arts_into_stem_education.html. Accessed on 31 Dec 2017.
Friedman, T. L. (2009). Hot, flat, and crowded 2.0: Why we need a green revolution–and how it can renew America. New York: Picador. ISBN-13: 978-0-312-42892-1.
Garrett, I. (2015). Arts, the environment, & sustainability. http://www.americansforthearts.org/by-program/reports-and-data/legislation-policy/naappd/arts-the-environment-sustainability. Accessed on 31 Dec 2017.
Jolly, A. (2014). https://www.edweek.org/tm/articles/2014/11/18/ctq-jolly-stem-vs-steam.html Accessed on 28 Dec 2017.
Kelley, S. S., & Williams, D. R. (2013). Teacher professional learning communities for sustainability: Supporting STEM in learning gardens in low-income schools. Journal of Sustainability Education.
Kelley, S. S., & Williams, D. R. (2014). http://clearingmagazine.org/archives/10755. Accessed on 28 Dec 2017.
Mathur, H. M. (2006). Resettling people displaced by development projects: Some critical management issues. Social Change, 36(1), 36–86.
Meadows, D. H., et al. (1972). The limits to growth. New York, 102(1972), 27.
NGSS Lead States. (2013). Next generation science standards: For states, by states. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
Pugh, T. A., MacKenzie, A. R., Whyatt, J. D., & Hewitt, C. N. (2012). Effectiveness of green infrastructure for improvement of air quality in urban street canyons. Environmental Science & Technology, 46(14), 7692–7699.
Wicked Problems. https://www.wickedproblems.com/1_wicked_problems.php
World Commission on Environment and Development. (1987). Our common future. New York: Oxford University Press, 400 p.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Choudhury, S., Cook, S., Bennett, B. (2019). The Role of STEAM in a Sustainable World. 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_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25101-7_10
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-25100-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-25101-7
eBook Packages: EducationEducation (R0)