Philosophy of
engineering
Is arts necessary in
STEAM analysis
Hiruthiv s
RA2211003020558
CSE I
The arts in STEAM education is arguably the most
significant feature of the framework.
STEAM education, as a concept, emerged from the
existing STEM initiative, which was originally
designed to emphasize the academic subjects that
teach the most important life skills, while also
encouraging more integrated lessons.
The idea behind STEAM education is to place a focus on
five key areas – science, technology, engineering, the
arts, and mathematics – while also encouraging the
teaching of those fields to be more engaging and
integrated. The idea grew out of a concept known as
STEM education, with the key difference being the
inclusion of the ‘A’ for the arts.
Arts in STEAM Education
While the importance of the arts is clear, one of the big focuses of STEAM
education is to facilitate integration. A good way to view this is via a quote from
the late CEO and co-founder of Apple, Steve Jobs, who said the following:
“It is in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough – that it’s technology married
with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our
hearts sing.”
This quote essentially explains STEAM in action. Photography is another good
example of an area where the arts clearly crosses over with the field of
technology. After all, modern photography relies not only on a camera for
capturing the images but also often on a computer and the right
monitor for photo editing purposes. Much of photography is also concerned with
images of the natural world, and this has a potential link to science and, in
particular, biology.
Meanwhile, the manual arts are all about manipulating objects, and this has
obvious cross-over potential with engineering, while lessons focused on
technical drawing are a good way to combine the arts with mathematics. Once
the links between the STEAM fields are understood, teaching in a more
integrated way becomes much easier.
STEAM education highlights the arts as one of its five
fields and its inclusion is important. After all, the arts
can help learners to develop the kind of creativity,
ingenuity, communication, and performance skills
that will assist them throughout their education, but
also with employment opportunities too.
As a field, the arts is extremely broad and diverse,
covering everything from painting and photography
to dance, history, and architecture. This does,
however, help teachers looking to integrate
elements of the arts into their lessons.
In this series on STEAM education, we have now
covered an introduction to the STEAM framework as well
as the importance of science, technology, engineering,
and the arts.
