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| Source: California Afterschool Network |
By Sam Piha
Carol Tang, Ph.D, is an expert on science in afterschool and she is also the Senior Vice President for Learning and Public Engagement at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. We interviewed Carol regarding STEM and STEAM in afterschool and her responses are below.
Q: Do you think that the movement from STEM to STEAM was a positive one for afterschool providers? What value or advantages did this shift create?
A: The move to broaden the concept of STEM to include arts was really important for afterschool providers and educators in informal organizations. For example, the federal government’s Institute of Museum and Library Services began to fund STEM initiatives in history museums, art museums, and cultural museums beyond science centers, zoos/aquariums, and natural history museums. I think that this helped everyone take STEM out of a silo where it may have seemed inaccessible.
But what worried me was that STEM and STEAM became acronyms that felt like a checklist of required elements. And I don’t think it should be a strict recipe—my hope is that these concepts are just ways to engage the natural curiosity and foster mastery in young people. I always hope that afterschool providers are inspired by the fact that there are math and science teaching moments everywhere—even during sports, snack time, playground games—and not just during homework help time. When I was the Director of the Coalition for Science Afterschool, we decided to use “science” rather than STEM simply because we were hoping to demystify and personalize the concept and we felt that any acronym made it feel prescribed rather than inclusive.
Q: In your observation of youth programs, what do you think they most often get wrong in the design of STEAM activities?
A: As always, my personal opinion is that when afterschool experiences prioritize school standards and academic outcomes, we are not doing what we do best for young people. I think when youth programs do not feel confident about leading STEAM activities or where they put cognitive goals first, they rely on activities where there is a clear “answer” or where the result is predictable. This is understandable because no practitioner wants to have an activity that doesn’t fit into the available time slot, are hard to set up/clean up, and where participants don’t get the answers to the questions they raise. This is true for both science AND art projects so it’s not unique to STEAM.
So, the best STEAM projects might be the ones where youth are exploring their own interests and they may not get the expected results. Or they may want to work at their own pace or in groups or individually. And maybe most importantly, the best projects might be ones where there are more questions at the end than there are easy answers.
We may have to accept in art, science, and STEAM projects that participants may not be satisfied with their results, that they think they “failed,” or they are not finished at the end of the day. I don’t think it’s easy to design high-quality STEAM activities but if one accepts these outcomes as still leading to a growth mindset (so important for STEM!) and that it fosters intrinsic curiosity, that allows us to re-define what “high-quality” means.
Q: In your observation of youth programs, what do you think they most often get right in the design of STEAM activities?
A: What I’ve enjoyed the most in observing afterschool professionals implementing STEAM is that the providers themselves learn to appreciate what science can be. So many of us had bad experiences at some time with math or science in school ourselves and we bring that fear and frustration unintentionally to our work. So, I absolutely love it when the adults in a program realize that STEAM can be fun and engaging and relevant, not just for youth, but for themselves personally.
I know it sounds cliche but once you realize how much chemistry there is in baking cookies or how much math is used to knit a beanie (and so many engineering examples all around us!), I think we can all relate to STEM a bit more. So, I think the best part of STEAM is how much it engages educators with a growth mindset about science and math. Once STEAM becomes a habit or part of our everyday practice, it doesn’t feel like a chore to incorporate it into our afterschool programming.
Q: Advocates for STEAM claim that activities are more accessible for girls and kids of color. Do you agree?
A: So many studies show that using STEAM approaches or any other integrated and applied approaches to STEM is much more effective for reaching young people who aren’t already interested in science. In fact, this is documented in our national science standards, NGSS, where a whole appendix is dedicated to this topic. I think it’s not just the addition of arts which brings in kids who claim they are “bad at math,” but it’s the fact that young people can see that STEM can be relevant to their own lives and mental well-being.
In this sense, I think STEM and STEAM in afterschool is so critically important. Learning in out-of-school settings can be more meaningful than learning it in a classroom because afterschool is more aligned to the “real world.” You can succeed in STEAM without rote answers and where failures can be more “educational” than predicted results.
This more accurately reflects what scientific research really is. Scientists will say that what excites them most is what we DON’T know about the world around us! In school, we learn about what we already discovered. In afterschool and in science, we experience and discover new things about the world and about ourselves.
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| Source: www.pexels.com |
Q: STEAM seems to favor collaboration and having young people work on teams. How is this reflected in the adult world of science being conducted?
A: One stereotype of a scientist is a “mad scientist” who works alone in the dark bringing evil to the world! In fact, most science today is done collaboratively either in person or virtually. These days, we are often collaborating with someone who may live thousands of miles away and we connect through virtual meetings, texts, shared documents. So having STEAM activities that are collaborative and project-based is more similar to what professional scientists and engineers do.
Another similarity is that on many professional work settings, teams are composed of people with different skills and talents. Collectively, they can look at challenges and solutions from different perspectives. Some folks may be computer modelers while others are in the field observing wildlife and yet others are performing chemical extractions in a laboratory. That also can mirror what happens in out-of-school time projects where youth have to discover what they are good at, how those skills complement each other and how they have to learn new skills and vocabulary to finish a project.
And lastly, what makes afterschool STEAM projects more similar to real world science research is that no one knows what the final product will be or even that it would be a successful result. In school, kids know that the activities probably have an “answer” and there is pressure to get a good grade on that project. In afterschool and in real life, there is no guarantee of a successful completion—but the discovery, growth, resilience, persistence and the collaboration itself can be a reward and should be celebrated and enjoyed.
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| Carol Tang, Ph.D. |
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