From STEM to STEAM: Integrating Art into STEM Education

Your STEM lessons already work. This week is about what the art actually adds, and where exactly it belongs in a unit you teach yourself.

• Monday — you turn one of your own curriculum topics into a question worth weeks of work, and design the moment that opens it.
• Tuesday — you build the investigation in the route your own classroom can actually run, and see what the other route would have looked like.
• Wednesday — you plan how students explain what they found by making something rather than writing about it.
• Thursday — you set the challenge that makes them use the idea somewhere new, and name the colleague you need for it.
• Friday — you write the marking criteria, then apply a colleague’s criteria to a quick piece that colleague made as a learner earlier in the week, which is where a rubric that rewards neatness shows itself.

You go home with a two-to-three-week unit outline for a topic you already teach, one phase written out in full, and the artefact brief that goes with it. You declare on the first morning which route your classroom can run — with devices or without — and build every phase in it, so nothing here depends on your school owning a set of laptops.

An MP3 player, John Maeda once pointed out, was pure STEM technology from the day it launched — chips, code, engineering, nothing more. “But until Apple came along, it didn’t become desirable.” That gap is the whole argument for the A in STEAM. Maeda led the STEM-to-STEAM movement while president of the Rhode Island School of Design, and he put the reason plainly: STEM on its own “doesn’t create warmth and humanity and connection.”

Agreeing with that is easy. Teaching it on a Tuesday morning is not, and this is where most STEAM courses stop — at the argument, without a sequence. So the week runs on one. The BSCS 5E Instructional Model was developed by Biological Sciences Curriculum Study in the late 1980s, and it is still one of the most widely used instructional sequences in science teaching. Engage, explore, explain, elaborate, evaluate — one phase per day. Participants work through each phase as learners first, then write that phase of their own unit before the day ends.

Two rules come from the model’s own authors, and both are commonly broken. A phase is not optional and the order is not negotiable — the research behind the sequence found reduced effectiveness when phases were dropped or moved. And it was never meant for a single lesson. Rodger Bybee, who led the team that built it, puts its working scale at a unit of two to three weeks. What participants design here is a unit, not a one-off activity.

The art is not an extra day. Each phase has a place where making something is how the thinking gets done: an object or image that creates the puzzle in the engage phase, an archive to investigate in the explore phase, a built explanation instead of a written one in the explain phase, a prototype in the elaborate phase. Three tools carry that work — Google Arts & Culture as an archive, Scratch for explanations that move, Tinkercad for things that have to be modelled in three dimensions. Each one sits in the phase it actually serves rather than in a “digital tools” day of its own.

The week is built for both sides of the hyphen. A science teacher with no art training designs the making tasks and keeps the science claim in view; an art or humanities teacher works from their own subject and identifies the STEM colleague the unit will need — Thursday is where that colleague is named and what to ask them for is worked out.

Schools are not equally equipped, so the route is chosen rather than assumed. Participants say on the first morning what their classroom really has and build every phase in that route — the tool route if there are devices, the physical route if there are not — with the alternative shown alongside so the choice stays visible. The physical route is not a lesser version. The explore phase was never defined as a screen activity in the first place — a paper model, a storyboard or a scale drawing does the same work as its on-screen equivalent. No one finishes the week with a unit their own school cannot run.

The last day takes on the question art integration actually fails on: how do you mark a Scratch animation or a 3D model for what the student understood, rather than for how good it looks? Participants write the criteria, then try to apply a colleague’s criteria to a quick piece that colleague made as a learner earlier in the week — which is usually where a rubric turns out to be measuring polish.