Making sense of teaching Science and the Arts in a human context

I was a very poor student. I was in the lowest reading group in a blue collar community. My mother was a reading specialist and my older brother was an academic genius. I was fast on the playground and slow in the classroom. Since I was born to Jewish parents at the beginning of WWII it was painfully clear that the world was crazy. By age eleven I knew I wanted to help heal our hurting world. When I heard Freud knew why the world was crazy, I wanted to become a psychoanalyst. Instead, I became a psychotherapist and studied community mental health, curriculum design, and English.

By accident, while in graduate school at UCLA, I wrote what became a somewhat popular children’s book. It was called Beautiful Junk, A Story of the Watts Towers. That book, without my knowing it, was to become both Bible and BluePrint for my life. It was about a black boy who travels from breaking things in anger to finding beauty and creating things from what is broken. But to move from anger to love he has to climb the fence that holds him in school.

That story brought me into classrooms as an author, and later as a writer-in-residence. Around that time I co-founded the Community Design Studio at the Southern California Institute of Architecture. The premise was that design is an inside job inspired by being on-site or in-residence, not by sitting in a cubicle at a drafting table. I also taught the psychology of design, which involved thinking about how intuition joins cognition to bring forth the best possible form and function, aesthetics and utility.It was the book, Beautiful Junk, that led a Foundation to provide seed money to bring other artists into an inner city Los Angeles School. Together we created a design studio to work on curriculum. This was known as The Artist-in-Residence Reading Project.

From the Artist-in-Residence Reading Project I learned that children are unbelievably beautiful, and pure when they are in their early grades, but by grade four, in the inner city, we begin to lose far too many children. I learned that to become mentally healthy a person has to discover their voice and choice and to connect these to the symbol making process. I learned that we are social animals, and that our didactic, shallowly academic curriculum stifles everyone’s social and expressive needs. I learned that the artists were able to light beautiful fires in classrooms and the teachers, with all good intentions, too often were persistent in stifling those fires. Finally, I learned that our team of artists was profoundly inspired by the children, and by the more open teachers. The artists got as much from being in the project as the children. That was an effect I had not anticipated.

A Humanistic Approach to Teaching Science

I am inspired by the arts, science, and emerging technology. Science is the art and discipline of observing, caring, wondering and asking questions in order to explore and discover. Science looks to go more deeply into the design of the creation. Science asks how the world works, how people function. What is most important within a given context.

Science is also the source of so much that we value in our culture. Science has made engineering at current levels possible. That engineering is now driving science, which in turn is improving our potential to avoid and treat diseases, process and communicate information, and discover the nature of the society and the universe — pushing our knowledge to ever more subtle levels that stimulate more questions, more inquiry and reflection, more measurement based observation and fertile uncertainty.

At heart, science is curiosity stimulated by observation, hypotheses joined to experimentation. It is wonderfully rational and incredibly intuitive and productive. The best in our society is a product of science joined to technology. And, of course, both science and technology are profoundly influenced by mathematical insights.

But science without aesthetics, without idiosyncratic inquiry, without personal symbol making, which art is largely about, risks becoming sterile. Where scientific inquiry is motivated by objective questions, objective observations, usually about the outer world, artistic inquiry is more motivated by a quest for self- or at least expressive knowledge. Artists experiment in self-expression, in finding their unique voice, in gaining insight into the unfathomable depths of being in this place with these people and with nature.

Both the Arts and Sciences are motivated by curiosity and inspired observation and pursued through focus and discipline, but they explore different realms. In the end, the arts document our struggle to achieve our sanity and humanity. The sciences pursue more objective knowledge of the creation.

That said, science can turn the light of its tools onto patterns in human intelligence, intuition and so on. And the arts can provide an intuitive view of the horizons where objective knowledge dissolves into subjective awe and wonder.

STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) provides the methods and tools to bring public education into the 21st Century in the very best sense. Personalised Learning can now realise its potential if we apply the sciences of management, learning, personality development, and diversity to how we design, diversify, and then publish our curriculum. We should be equally interested in teacher diversity and personalised staff development. This is a whole new field of Research, Development and Design.

Our current technology provides an unbelievable curriculum design environment, whether we’re designing for on or off-screen learning, and it has inherent within it entirely new research potentials that span all the factors that both inspire and limit our learning.

Finding the Right Balance

What is the relationship between the Arts and  STEM as relates to education. The Arts are a somewhat different form of inquiry and their  expression is tuned to communication. What the arts offer to curriculum design is sensitivity to aesthetics, and aesthetics are the velcro that helps ideas to stick. So, when I think about forming a curriculum design team, I want to see lots of fine scientists and researchers, joined by artists, working together with software engineers.

I’m much less interested in the “application of STEM content” than in figuring out how schools begin to function as STEM studios, workshops, or laboratories. The classrooms are where the students and teachers are. This is where the design action is.

The best learning is immersive, not didactic. Content teaching tends to be dreadfully and redundantly didactic, though gifted presenters provide a wonderful exception as do productions by great media artists.

Being part of a research team, doing an R&D project with scientists and designing curriculum by working with designers, that is an immersive and creative experience. STEM is to be lived, it’s an approach to life and a new kind of culture for our schools. STEM is not just to be learned about, it’s to be lived.

Having said that, we should do a much better job providing a curriculum that tells the amazing story of the history of science and technology in medicine, engineering, transportation, manufacturing, business, knowledge transfer (publishing) and so on. And we should tell the story of the main themes in cultural and human development.

The biographies of great physical and social scientists, mathematicians, engineers and other people who have contributed to our culture should be well understood by students and their teachers. Our culture is lifted by their vision and dedication.

Thinking About Diversity in Our Teaching

Diversity is one of the great mysteries of the universe (uni-verse means one poem or song) because no two people are ever entirely alike nor are contexts ever repeated exactly. The Latin ideal on our national seal says “Unity Through Diversity.”

But diversity is not easily perceived because our egos tend to think everyone else is pretty much like us and we’ve been here before. We have trouble getting quiet enough to make room for people who are very different from ourselves and for new moments. It may well be that perceiving human diversity much more deeply is one of the frontier challenges we now face. Certainly, educating for diversity is a frontier challenge for school reform.

And here is where joining STEM with the Arts associated (STEAM) with great curriculum design is so important. Technology now makes it possible for us to do amazing research about diversity as it relates to learning, motivation, and our social and other drives. If we are serious about achieving personalised learning, we need to build that personalised learning on research into diversity. Prior to computer science there was no way to operationalize this kind of research and then design and publish curriculum in response to the continuously evolving  results.

However, I’m afraid that STEM in our schools has fallen far short of its potential because we have seen it as a subject, or set of subjects to teach, while failing to apply STEM to our teaching and learning, curriculum design and assessment processes.

Ironically, while loudly declaring that education should be research based, we continue to ignore the learning, management, and human development research while turning STEAM and SEL into subjects taught from textbooks and uninspired lectures in preparation for tests that serve a stupefying accountability.

When will we rise above the entropy of current practices and begin to learn and celebrate the benefits of inventing our knowledge culture.