Reinventing the STEAM Engine for Art + Design Education

If we work every day as K–12 art + design teachers, arts coordinators, museum professionals, or university teacher educators, why should science, technology, engineering, art, and math (STEAM) matter? STEAM matters because we are more than just instructors of art and art education. While most of our students year in and year out will not become professional artists, we are nevertheless arguably the primary teachers of creativity our students will ever have throughout their education. Fundamentally, our job is to instigate and foster arts practice and design thinking as a means for individual learning, social responsibility, and creative problem solving—mediating ideas and materials toward meaningful and enduring solutions. The art studio is one of the very few spaces in school or society where widely divergent outcomes are encouraged and never-before-imagined design solutions are valued. As an acronym for educational imagination, STEAM promises the enhancement of divergent outcomes emerging from the art + design studio by immersing students in a diversity of knowledge bases across contributing domains of Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math. Moreover, one of the best things about STEAM education is that you do not have to figure out how to invent the STEAM engine for innovation alone. Diverse collaborations and resources equip STEAM classrooms for locomotion.