STREAM EDUCATION - When STEM is not enough.
A STEAM strategy will help un into embedding arts and sciences pedagogy together with an integration of technologies, project-based education, transversal experiment from Kindergarten and Gr1 to Gr5. As a reminder, the acronym means : Science - Technology - (Robotic) Reading - Engineering - Arts - Maths.
STEM education has been a major progress in the last decade to introduce sciences and technologies in the middle school pedagogies. However, the workforce et permanently mutating towards trans-disciplinary jobs where the abilities and competences shifted drastically. Architecture and Arts natively demand these abilities of creativity and design-thinking. Indeed, just as the advantages the United States enjoyed in the past were based in large part on scientific and engineering advances, today it is cognitive flexibility, inventiveness, design thinking, and non-routine approaches to messy problems that are essential to adapt to rapidly changing and unpredictable global forces.
STREAM empowers teachers to employ project-based learning that crosses each of the five disciplines and fosters an inclusive learning environment in which all students are able to engage and contribute. As opposed to traditional models of teaching, educators using the STREAM framework bring the disciplines together, leveraging the synergy between the modelling process and math and science content, for example, in order to blur the boundaries between modelling techniques and scientific/mathematical thinking. Through this holistic approach, students are able to exercise both sides of their brain at once.
STREAM education is the ultimate culture of makers. There is no greater integrity, no greater goal achieved, than an idea articulately expressed through something made with your hands. We call this constant dialogue between eye, mind, and hand "critical thinking -- critical making." A hands-on practice tackles the haptic sense of the students giving a much faster cognitive appreciation of a problem. Critical thinking is a skill that is impossible to teach directly but must be intertwined with content. It’s an education in getting your hands dirty, with constant active learning, in understanding why you made what you made, and owning the impact of that work in the world. It's what artists and designers do as much as architect, even closer to engineers as they traditionally are. That is also the reason why we decided to implement these educational methods for the children to integrate their basic knowledges into hands-on projects.
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