A training of teachers to improve creativity and interdisciplinary in STEAM education
“You can’t teach people everything they need to know. The best you can do is position them where they can find what they need to know when they need to know it.”
Seymour Papert
This quote is a strong source of inspiration that drives the let’s Steam project! Our project aims to provide teacher trainings to support them in the field of STEAM subjects (science, technology, engineering, art, and math).
These trainings will provide basic skills in programming and using programmable boards in the classroom. In addition, the courses will include major cross-curricular training related to creativity, interdisciplinary work, and innovative pedagogical strategies focused on the project-based approach.
Our objectives are:
- Develop teachers’ skills in programming
- Implement digital solutions in the classroom
- Promote interdisciplinary and creativity in the learning process
- Develop and propose good practices and inspiring examples of innovative pedagogies in secondary education.
- Use popular classroom software tools (Scratch, MakeCode, CircuitPython)
To make it possible, 8 European partners from universities, educational and associative organizations engaged in educational innovation are involved.
Why this project?
Computer science can be considered as the grammar of the 21st century, it is omnipresent in our daily lives. Giving students access to the keys to understanding its issues is a major challenge.
French school programs are increasingly focusing on computer science, which is now present in mathematics, technology, physical sciences, and also biology, without mentioning some specific courses that have appeared in high school.
Moreover, it is expected that between 2017 and 2027, the jobs that will require STEAM skills and competencies will grow by at least 13%(vitalsigns.ecs.org). To tackle this challenge, schools in Europe should implement STEAM strategies and pedagogies to promote interdisciplinary and innovative initiatives within the classrooms.
In order to respond to these issues, our goal is to involve teachers through active pedagogies with a techno-creative approach (Romero et al., 2017).
Some inspiring projects
As a teacher involved in this project, I have already been able to experiment this type of approach with my pupils.
It consisted in developing different projects that would respond to the objectives of sustainable development. The pupils first collaboratively created a prototype and then documented it in order to explain the solutions implemented.
Science topic: a connected fountain collecting rainwater for ensuring sustainable management of water resources
3d model of the fountain
Arts topic: how to make music accessible to the hearing impaired?
In this project, students developed a solution to associate each musical note with a color to express the related emotions.
These students were then able to train teachers to carry out this project collaboratively.
Methodology: how is the teacher training program organized?
Here is the methodology followed to accompany the teachers in the training module.
How to address all audiences?
In order to make the participation in Let’s Steam training workshops as enriching as possible for the trainees, we will collect through the first assessment step to get the participants’ level of computer science skills as well as the subjects they teach.
This way, we will be able to guide the reflection by targeting the concepts that can be reached, but also influence the constitution of the working groups :
- Teachers that teach the same subject together?
- teachers, from the same school to encourages a dynamic of interdisciplinary collaboration?
Through these group discussions, it will be possible to share knowledge and ideas, and undoubtedly give rise to future collaborations.
Conclusion
The Let’s STEAM project has been designed to provide the set of skills for teacher to enhance their STEAM approach by training them in programming but more importantly to help them understand the potential in terms of pedagogy of interdisciplinary use of programming so that can be able to create innovative pedagogical content in class with and for their students. In this context, Let’s STEAM is following a staged methodology to first survey and understand the needs and the basic skills of teachers with respect to programming capabilities; to gather requirements and compile recommendations to enrich the current open source programming platforms of Scratch, MakeCode and CircuitPython and their interface to STM32 board with advanced and tailored functionalities; to propose a training framework and content to be developed.
Stay tuned!
Feel free to visit the project website http://www.lets-steam.eu/
and follow us on Twitter: @lets_steam_eu
references :
Romero, M., Lepage, A., & Lille, B. (2017). Computational thinking development through creative programming in higher education. International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 14(1), 42.
Guyotte, K. W., Sochacka, N. W., Costantino, T. E., Kellam, N. N., & Walther, J. (2015). Collaborative creativity in STEAM: Narratives of art education students’ experiences in transdisciplinary spaces. International journal of education & the arts, 16(15).
Wing, J. M. (2006). Computational thinking. Communications of the ACM, 49(3), 33–35.
Wynn, T., & Harris, J. (2012). Toward a STEM+ arts curriculum: Creating the teacher team. Art Education, 65(5), 42–47.
You will find below a poster presenting this project.
This Story was made in the framework of the SmartEdTech Master with the impulse of Jorge Sanabria-Z
