STEAM & the Future of Education 1

00:00:06 good morning everyone if you would collect your thoughts and pause your conversations this is a very low mic um we're gonna get started this morning so this morning we are talking about steam now if you were here last night or tune in for the live stream this is a generative dialogue conference that we're having it's there's no pre-scripted presentations there's nothing like that the goal of this conference is to really evolve a conversation over the course of three

00:00:37 days we're on day two now we have a very full day so we'll have lots of conversations to evolve but this morning we're going to talk about steam in the future of Education so for those of you don't know what steam is it stands for science technology engineering art math the idea is that it's kind of as well-rounded holistic approach to education where students aren't just siloed into one discipline or another but they understand how disciplines are related to each other can help each other work with each other and it's a new educational movement it was started

00:01:09 in 2008 after there was a lot of buzz about stem which came from our government wanting people to go into stem so we could have the competitive edge in our 21st century space races but steam is adding the art in there it's adding the design and the humanities and I think all of us in this room pretty much agree that's important to some degree so this morning we have five experts in various facets of steam

00:01:39 education and remodeling education in this 21st century I will be filling in for my colleague nirav Patel who I work with that Rutgers I'll be talking about what Rutgers is doing in this vein and I will hand it over to Zak to do the rest of the introductions so if each participant could raise their hand as I call their name so that our viewers online will know who you are first we have Roger Malina Roger Malina is an art science

00:02:11 researcher space scientist astronomer and editor of Leonardo terra rota Tara Tara is the manager of the bio art lab at the School of Visual Arts in a practicing artist as Julia mentioned filling in for Nava Patel is Julia Montaigne founder of Sai Art Center Elizabeth waters Elizabeth is a democracy and knowledge consultant and

00:02:42 educator at inquiring minds USA Alana Quinn Alana is an exhibit and program organizer at the cultural program at the National Academy of Sciences and Tyler alo Tyler is co-founder of Eureka's an artist and an award-winning steam specialist with that let's begin the conversation we we've talked to a number

00:03:19 of times about steam education how do we how do we build a model for it is there one curriculum are there multiple curriculums so I'll get to my question to you in a second but to kind of explain my role here in addition to my work with SCI art I am an adjunct innovator in residence at Rutgers University they made up that title for me I don't I still don't know what it means although I've had it for a little while now but basically my role is to drum up cross-disciplinary activity on campus I teach a January steam course

00:03:51 but when I started teaching this class I went to make the syllabus and then as soon as I sat down I realized gee how do I do this not make the syllabus part I know how to do that but how do I make a syllabus for something that doesn't have a roadmap to it it's not an English class where you read X amount of books and you write X amount of essays it's really kind of uncharted territory so I started to reach out to other people including a lot of people in this room and Roger saying okay like what what's your steam syllabus look like what what

00:04:22 are the goals of a steam class how do you teach someone in a cross-disciplinary manner for an 11-day class like mine or for a 4-month class like a regular semester so that's when I got started with this conversation about a year and a half ago and I realized that every person involved in steam kind of has their own approach they're all very like-minded but part of the reason I want to talk about this this morning was that so we could kind of come together and continue nailing down like we were last night with collaboration

00:04:53 you know what are the goals and maybe how do we define it better so that we can all do better in our own work so I know that you've had a lot of thoughts about this Roger especially when it comes to educating cross-disciplinary people especially at the graduate level so if you want to speak to that a little bit I'd love to hear more okay so let me just begin with a little bit of context so I was born of the English mother and a Texan father in Paris so I come from a very hybrid cultural background which I

00:05:26 know affects my thinking second thing is I worked for 30 40 years as a astrophysicist building telescopes to put on satellites I've experienced the thrill of discovery and so I've had the joyful experience of discovering things that people didn't know before in parallel with that as was mentioned I'm the executive editor of a number of publications at MIT press called the

00:05:56 Leonardo publications which seeks document and advocate the work of all our discussion and we're now celebrating our fiftieth anniversary five years ago I was forced to retire in France because in France there's a mandatory retirement age and the universities of 65 and I got this incredible offer in Dallas to open a non science lab funded by rich Texan

00:06:30 with all the implications that comes with although they don't meddle in what I'm doing and I have true academic freedom which is slightly frightening today when we look at the state of education in general my teaching contract says I will teach one course a semester to graduate students on a topic of my choice and that's in writing and

00:07:03 so I've never taught the same thing twice why my seminars are typically a dozen students and what's fascinating and exciting is that the students come from very different disciplinary backgrounds so in the seminar this year I if someone who's working on our Center for brain health working on games for autistic children I'm working with a young man who's in GIS geographic

00:07:37 information systems and he's been scanning buildings on the campus before they're pulled down and making Holograms of them I have students that are students but are using new ways of expressing themselves so let me tell you it's really difficult to figure out what it is we want to teach or what we think people should learn and I think one of

00:08:07 the problems I have is I think universities have reached the limit of their usefulness because they try to teach for the normal student and let me tell you none of the students in my seminar are normal they they all have hybrid interests multiple interests I was an aero astronomer for thirty years and let me tell you I did astronomy 24 hours a day and night they they all are

00:08:38 trying to figure out how the university is going to help them do a career that mixes their hybrid interests and universities just don't think that way so I think the future of STEM education is outside of the university education or at least maybe that's part of it I definitely experience the same with my students and I'm sure that you guys do

00:09:08 too or they're just not satisfied with I don't know maybe the way we went to school where you just kind of focus in on one thing Tara so you run a really amazing lab that I was a student at SVA so I had the pleasure meeting Tara as the lab manager SVA can you talk a bit about what's going on there I think maybe what sets it apart ordinarily when

00:09:39 we think about stem we think about integrity bringing bringing the arts into science and technology and engineering and math but in our lab it's a bio art lab at the School of Visual Arts it was founded in 2011 by Suzanne anchor we essentially do the reverse we put the stem toolbox in the hands of art students and our curriculum is project-based learning so we tend to work backwards we put it in their hands and then follow their curiosity and sort

00:10:11 of untangle the logistics to lay some more formal and technical groundwork and they sort of get a crash course and all things biology a lot of it is material oriented so we work with a lot of organisms that have image and mold-making capabilities so they paint with bacteria and grow sculptures out of mushrooms and bacterial cellulose they do a lot of food transformations and

00:10:41 work quite a bit with DNA and a bit of plant modification so it's a spectrum and for the most part they're all undergraduate art students that have little to no background in the sciences so they're really coming in sort of as a blank slate and we definitely see that shift throughout the semester you know they approached the lab initially and it's sort of a sterile facility and what

00:11:11 feels like an academic field that they don't belong to but within a few weeks they've figured out how to navigate the space and they start approaching it as they would any of their other studio facilities so they come in and they can manipulate in shape life and get a more personal grasp on some of the advancements in biotechnology and explore their concerns about the biological world so for the most part it

00:11:45 is a project-based material oriented studio facility but it is a it's a spectrum so on the other end as a group we often collaborate on longer term or academic projects as well but for the most part we function as a studio space I wonder how what's your experience with

00:12:17 these kind of typical art school students who come in and all of a sudden they're immersed in science I mean I think and that's sort of how we shaped our curriculum immediately when you put something in front of an artist they want to start manipulating it they don't want to know all of the details they want to dive in and so we've accommodated that we figured out how to restructure ordinary workshops or

00:12:51 educational seminars in a way in which they get hooked and invested and and then we can sort of follow their concerns and unravel that but I would say they are boundless they have no hesitation endless questions and no desire to follow any of the rules as lab manager it makes it a little tricky for me I tend to be the naysayer as an artist running in a bio

00:13:21 lab we definitely follow the rules forwards and backwards so I think one of the things that's really hard for an art student or someone that's not familiar with a laboratory space is to recognize the difference in context so a lot of times when we're talking about cultures or contamination you know we'll say a moldy loaf of bread and your dorm room is a few missed sandwiches but in the bio lab it's you know a hazard and it has to be terminated immediately so I think for them some of these very

00:13:53 contextual differences about even things that they encounter and their domestic day-to-day lives are quite interesting for them what about you Tyler working with younger students in this field so we also are doing project-based learning but a lot of what we're doing is trying to teach different types of literacy and

00:14:23 I would say over the last year year and a half really the focus has been more on an engineering literacy as people are trying to reintroduce kind of and redefine vocational training mostly around computer technology 3d modeling printers and things like that schools are investing a lot into these labs but they don't have the projects to actually do anything with them or the knowledge and some of that knowledge takes years to acquire so really what we're trying to do from a very early age

00:14:54 and we do work all the way through with college students and even at all earners is to develop projects that are teaching different skill sets whether it's engineering but also the vocabulary that goes with it be able to problem-solve use your creativity and children especially or like artists you know they're not bound by anything they have lots of questions don't really care about the answers necessarily to begin with what they're

00:15:25 interested in is exploring and then figuring out why something doesn't work and then going back and maybe fixing it so it does work and so a lot of times what we're talking about - and we're going in and training teachers is developing tools for the teachers to be able to change the context the subject matter the subject matter becomes kind of the inspiration for the students all learners learn in different ways visually some tactile and so by

00:15:57 developing these projects that are truly kind of transdisciplinary you're able to also bring out the strengths and different learners if that makes sense because so often in schools you know with our data-driven kind of models that we have it's really based more on the tests reading writing math science is not really high highly valued either so what kids are getting is you know you don't get really chemistry until you're in middle or high school and you only

00:16:27 get kind of a certain type of chemistry where I remember going to school as a kid and you were constantly getting bits of information to the point where maybe by high school you were figuring out what your passions were and what you were good at so by the time you got to college you could focus a little bit more directly on something okay so my burning question of the day and I know that earliest of the hour and I know you guys have your own - is it is it

00:16:59 possible to develop a standard steam curriculum is that something we should do I would say no I I think as we work and we work from the west coast to the East Coast all aged learners is that really people are so driven by the tests and you go into schools teachers don't have the freedom anymore to develop lesson plans that are able to

00:17:31 transfer knowledge to students every year there's a new set of standards that they're trying to deal with and there's these assessments and really kids from an early age are being taught that there's a wrong right and a wrong way to do things and I think that bringing the arts back into stem you know and really expanding on that definition of what art is gives learners of all ages that opportunity to say there is no right or wrong this is really more about play it's more about

00:18:03 expressing my interest learning more about my interest doing the research and it doesn't have to be right or wrong and then you can carry that over and I think this is where some of that transdisciplinary conversation was going last night is that through that freedom then you can kind of focus in on the science of it or other aspects of it but to give people the space to be creative without the right or the wrong and so by

00:18:33 putting standards to it I think would kind of mess up what's going on with with the movement as a whole I definitely agree but I also just totally disagree because I think a lot of us here we want to see steam like educators want to see steam take off and be implemented how do you implement something with that blueprint how do you teach someone who's not a steam educator to be one well let me just mention we're

00:19:07 just finishing a project right now and I was just discussing with Harvey how in the Beltway they want evidence that steam is a good thing and they only accept certain kinds of evidence and test scores it's obviously part of that landscape so one of the things that Peter Western Aldous ena articulated was well can you give me really good examples of what stem

00:19:39 involves steam involves just give me 20 really good examples that you could explain to a congressperson and so I've been working with a PhD student now for a year with about 20 nominators and it's it's such a diverse landscape of what people are doing so it's not like there is a steam example that's the example there are about 20 but we have 20 right

00:20:11 now but each one of you probably would come up with 20 different maybe overlapping examples of why we're so excited about what's going on and why we think school systems should pay attention and the trouble is are our systems are uncomfortable with that ambiguity is how he was saying to me where as you say the way it's not a right or wrong answer it's a process

00:20:42 that might lead you to somewhere where you couldn't have gone otherwise and school systems hate that I mean it's really a very difficult problem [Music] I never heard the bad steam until I met Julia so I know very little about it so if I'm going to say anything or ask question that I'm it's stupid I apologize beforehand but what I'm not clear about is one

00:21:12 when does this theme education begin second is what is the goal of this education and three has it been looking on long enough for you to be able to say this is what happens when somebody goes through these themed programs what is what is it they do when thirty year old has gone through this whole program what is he doing and how is that being

00:21:43 through that education has made him different from somebody like me who never went through that education I think the thing that the question have for other people is in your examples of what steam education looks like what is the relative balance of practices versus content my background is as a neuroscientist interested in development and memory and hormones and moving into education and what I love most about

00:22:16 changes in science education are the discussions that have their own the next generation science standards because it's multi-dimensional and one very important part of that is practices and certainly in the work that I do in elementary education now we're talking about it how do you practice curiosity how do you practice creativity there's a lot of Mythology that surrounds those things it's actually things you do not as a person not your the things you make

00:22:48 so I think the what a steam student would look like as a 30 year old or a 40 year old someone coming out of an educational system would be somebody who's confident in their ability to explore their world and identify questions and generate solutions for themselves and then discuss it with other people like I think those are the four core things for me a lot of people who are like that

00:23:21 maybe the audience I actually I see some furrowed brows in the audience I'm not sure I think internally but there is something reinforcing about getting someone to the table that feels less than qualified i I don't know much about stereotype threat but I get the impression that it is a way to get people involved I know with our art students they have no hesitation to make art and if they were

00:23:53 to sit down and be asked to do a research or a science experiment there would be great aversion but when we set it on the table as art before they know it they've done science and they feel a lot more capable not only as an individual but as a maker and I think them being able to demystify some of the technical aspects about their biological worlds gives them a more intimate understanding and even a sense of authority which is really empowering mm-hmm yeah and also

00:24:24 importantly you know the people who go through Steam education they're not gonna grow up to be prejudiced about art or science or technology or engineering or math or literature you know these are people who are going to understand an equally value all of the disciplines that we have and I think that's the real difference and in that that creates a situation where say say someone is a steam education but they grow up to be you know a mathematician it means that

00:24:55 they might they might be more open to collaborating like we were talking about last night to solve a problem or or you know it might mean that they just run in social circles that are outside of their own discipline I mean steam has this really it's hard to define and the reason that we are kind of skirting around it is because there's not one definition there's not one curriculum but but it's a whole whole-body mindset let me just jump in to try and this discussion is not old

00:25:26 not you at least a hundred thousand years old mm-hmm and so there were hunters and gatherers and probably the hunters got trained the hunt and the gatherers got trained together but then occasionally there were a few people that did both and they learned things in hunting that really helped the gathering and so I think one of the problems is our school systems have gotten so now that that

00:25:57 fluidity between different ways of knowing and doing you know in the Middle Ages you are either making you know you were a horse shoemaker or a horse shoemaker and you had to decide which guild you were in there was the guild of shoemakers and the guild but what happened then is these academies appeared that bridged the guilds right and so the the early academies was an effort to to do that in the last century

00:26:31 we had holistic studies into integrative studies interdisciplinary studies so roughly every generation there's a group of people that feels that the system is keeping the hybrids all the osmosis between the disciplines from really happening so I say steam is a new expression of that very long need to so the people both learn and teach in ways which allow

00:27:01 that lateral transfer over the last 15 20 years I've been actively involved in creating interdisciplinary meetings if and so and as a result of that I have learned that tremendous amount and it has opened my eyes to a lot of things that before in my narrow discipline I couldn't think about and use it to improve my own

00:27:34 understanding including within my own discipline so there has been an interdisciplinary conversation that have assisted and has held but I have a sense that what you mean by statements in education is something a lot more structured and concrete than just you know hanging around with people from different discipline and talking to them so that's what my question was about so if I carefully go in it if I could talk a little bit about the relevancy and and

00:28:06 what a student would look like getting out of school at 30 monic and I often times are asked to go into at-risk schools and work with students so a couple years ago we developed a whole suite of projects around simple machines which in Common Core Standards kids get in second third grade about 40% English language learners they were probably rated about 60% proficiency they were probably right

00:28:37 around that with dependents rating we were working with the science teacher and over the course of his semester working with second third graders you know in those communities oftentimes the kids don't have a lot of time with their parents and so there's there's great gaps and where these students are coming into school too and by the end of the semester we had gone you know from these very low ratings to ninety-six percent attendance rating about 87 percent

00:29:09 proficiency rating and a lot of this was based on the fact that one we're working with English language learners but two through these projects that we developed we're doing things like storyboarding templates and otama to theater boxes so the kids are having to develop characters they're having to do a story outlines and then they're actually having to do the engineering and put together these boxes so that they can crank their toys and again so this is very transdisciplinary but what you start seeing it at an early age is that all kids excel at different levels

00:29:40 and that confidence that they get from seeing how somebody who might not excel at reading and writing is now excelling in engineering and so you're also starting to get kids in an early age to start working together but I would say also since we've been doing this long enough we've had students in our programs for four or five years and oftentimes what we see is this intuitive understanding that they start to get of these subject matters and I think this is where the conversation was going last night a little bit too is that artists

00:30:13 are very intuitive about the world when you think about the golden section you know artists were using this long before scientists philosophers actually put the math to it to decipher what it was Jackson Pollock paintings you know later now that we have the technology you know explore fractal design and theory I'm sure he did not know what he was doing and I don't even think they were talking about fractals back then right but so this intuitive understanding of the world is something that we really have

00:30:45 gotten away from because we've become so specialized in our fields in the way that we teach subjects and apply it in education that what we're not allowing kids to do from an early age is start to develop that intuitive understanding of the world that they live in and to really start figuring out what they excel at so that that becomes kind of their focus in life yeah so this is having at all educational levels and they're definitely different approaches depending like what age you're teaching

00:31:16 um I'm gonna ask Elana to jump in here because she is graciously filling in for a colleague of hers from the National Academy of Sciences and and you can kind of describe the effort that's been going on at the NA s in terms of identifying the steam landscape or so there is a lot of anak evidence about the benefits of a steam or steam education to include the

00:31:47 humanities so the the Academy has decided to undertake a two-year study on evidence of the value of integrating Arts and Humanities into STEM education specifically at the undergraduate and graduate level and the study looks at different programs throughout the US and the the findings will actually be

00:32:18 published this coming spring so yeah but it looks at a variety of programs like it I think ASU has a lot of very integrated programs Olin College of Engineering has a few program a few courses that combine different disciplines so it's really looking at a variety of these programs and we'll set forth resource for best

00:32:51 practices so if you were a professor at a university and you were interested in getting involved in this field how might you go about it this could be a good resource and are they still accepting submissions you know for evidence yeah no I think that ended in May so they're kind of wrapping up the study at this point but yeah it's been going on for a little while really looking forward to see what they come up with me too yeah I'd like to say I do think the humanities are an important part of it when we talk about the a and steam so

00:33:24 much of what we're doing is actually putting in that historical and cultural context you know it's very easy to take current technology and take it back 5,000 years to see how that thought process has evolved that's also something kids get excited about because as kids like to say any time before cellphones was the dark ages I'm glad you just spent that because I despite the fact that I'm a steam practitioner I like really hate the acronym I mean catchy you can say funny

00:33:56 things like is steam just a bunch of hot air which I don't know if we ever settled on that one but but yeah the acronym leaves out humanities like the arts are not the humanities and in maybe it's a disservice to talk about that way so is there another word for steam like what's the next gen I think redefining how we think of art is really a better conversation because really when you think about what is art what ends up in the annals of history it's really what's

00:34:30 important as a cultural significance you know that knowledge at the time the technology whatever it is that's really what you're learning about when you're learning about art history and culture we recently had a group of children toward the lab that were from PS I believe 92 and a handful of other steam programs will come to check out the lab and more than once we've been showing them around maybe you know feeding a Venus flytrap sand fingernail clippings

00:35:00 or another task of sorts and I kept hearing the children say to each other that's so steamy and it sounds like okay I'm officially old that sounds cool but I have no idea what it means and then and this was maybe two years ago before steam was an acronym that I was very familiar with and then it clicked that's the way that they were referring to a spectrum of all things awesome and for them it was hype it was cool and steamy sounds pretty good

00:35:32 all things awesome it was Black Mountain College and early version of this yeah because there many orders came out of their Dorothea Rathbun and so who studying mathematics study the art yeah let me just jump in so I think the way we're phrasing the question it's part of the problem and we get into the subject

00:36:02 of taxonomy x' science humanities engineering math that's not how the world is organized right this table doesn't care discipline you come from and so and the problems we have trouble with fuzzy taxonomies universities hate them because you kind of have a department of fuzzy things and so I think part of the challenge you know as you said whitening they've been hundreds thousands of

00:36:34 places that have done what we're talking about over over the centuries and so how how do we think differently about what we're trying to do when I got to Dallas I got exposed to and I met my close collaborators Ksenia Nazir who's a design professor and I'm a scientist I'm an engineer I've designed things but let me tell you my idea of design was so narrow so he

00:37:06 says ok and this is part of some of the design vocabulary so what is the social outcome you're trying to achieve through what you're doing become rich and famous make a better will find someone to marry have a family and depending on the social outcome you you need to approach it differently so what is the social outcome you're trying to achieve then the next step is how do you organize a

00:37:36 group of people to achieve that social outcome how do you design the group if you can do it by yourself go do it by yourself got that but if you need a group of people with different skills and so on then design the group that way to achieve to try and achieve your social outcome next level that will then design the services that group needs in order to work to achieve that social outcome and then at the bottom of the list is products so maybe

00:38:08 you do you need it do need a cell phone to achieve that social outcome and let me tell you in my physics engineering education I never thought that way and if you think that way the humanities is not something outside of the problem it's inside the problem and I think this whole thing of steam steam heat in England humanities entering on techno there's no heat without steam I think

00:38:38 the problem is with thinking in a way the people of thought in universities in my case for 200 years now and that we need to find a different way of articulating the the problem so yeah we need a hundred thousand right Mountain colleges but how do you organize that to happen in structures that want test scores that want departmental structures that and that's why I deep inside me and

00:39:09 I hope my Provost is not listening I'm not sure that the university is the right place because it's organized in a way that's antagonistic to the very idea that we're talking about yeah I sometimes feel that adults are not even the right place to start it's all very top-down we're designing for our world and inquiring minds we work in elementary schools offering students the opportunity to participate in the process to decide how they want

00:39:41 their school to be a better place what's interesting is they really know each other they know each other's strengths and weaknesses and they also know what they want for themselves and each other and so why thing that we use a lot our learning walls where students can address an essential question that's important to the test they have to take some day but they can use it to practice thinking and practice collaborating and for us it's

00:40:13 really looking at something bigger that sort of their future there we live in a democracy they need to be prepared to not only recognize their own individual opinion but also to participate in the group towards group goals and so they'll put up their ideas about the essential questions and then they'll start making connections so our oh you said if I ask what is my house my school like a community you said well our schools like a community because every room is a

00:40:43 different group of people and we're all doing different things but we're all working together and then somebody else will say well it within our room we are a community because we come from different places with different ideas and so they can take an idea that is science related or math related or humanities related or art related and bring it into that space I think if every child was taught that

00:41:14 way they wouldn't look like us as adults they would look very different and the thing that I think is most powerful for me and that is my concern is maybe not STEM education per se and I'm a scientist so again if anybody's listening I do really love science but it's the way it's to really equal the playing field you can do this in a school with with absolutely no resources where their greatest resources their students you can do it in a school that has a lot of resources their greatest

00:41:45 resource is still their students but we don't teach students that way and so even taking problem-based education further sometimes we just need to give space for students to have conversations like we have this opportunity as adults they don't always have that opportunity as students and so I I I would again it's not I'm not a fan of stem or steam although I love a good pun and it you know a joke coming from a scientist is always funny

00:42:16 to everyone I want some sort of higher level name that's more encompassing that's not you know something below the cloud yes I I feel like this this acronym problem is something I've been thinking about for a while who never won something you've had for a while maybe by tomorrow we'll have a better idea I mean it's it's ambitious but it's possible because we're gonna be doing another steam panel later on so we can

00:42:47 we can see how that evolves but yeah everyone put your thinking caps on about that we need to figure this out there is a term convergence that I like the Academy published a study about convergence it was really looking at benefits of bringing different scientific disciplines together but I think you could also apply arts and humanities into it and it ties in with the idea of transdisciplinarity that we were talking about last night where

00:43:19 these different disciplines come together in a really in-depth way and the focus is on solving some kind of problem so I don't know what you what you might think of that term the adults are part of the problem so you know when

00:43:51 I was growing up there was the Montessori School movement there were a number of these very different models for elementary education and the problem was when you try to get into mass education you know then you get into this thing that everybody's taught as an average person and there's test score result so I think part of the complexity we have plenty of good examples of fan early educational models how do we

00:44:23 generalize those in some way so that it's not just the the lucky few that are go to the Montessori School well I would love to see a trickle up model I think elementary education teachers do a lot of innovative things with pedagogy and classroom practices that high school students and university students would benefit from I mean when you say that couple really practical things come to mind I mean my I'm also a mother my children went to a ratio school based on

00:44:56 play very self-directed there are opportunities within school to do that it will be a little bit harder at later levels but even within the elementary school oftentimes because students developmentally are at so many different levels as you mentioned earlier and just what experiences they have coming in they will use during math class activity stations and students will go to different activity stations to practice different schools it'll be individual practice group practice one will be an art space practice couldn't that instead

00:45:30 the station's be this one is a humanities this one is in art like make them more directed to each of that and still have it be around one core question I think at the university level this is something that could happen in an open lab like yours but maybe needs to be taken into that intro biology class and it's not it's not happening in that many places but I would love to see

00:46:01 sort of that trickle up from the idea of Montessori so just picking up on your trickle up thing so you know we're also in a well where we talk about formal education in formal education and what's the third called lifelong learning or something continuing education right well from the trickle up point of view we do believe in lifelong learning right so even in the workplace somehow what

00:46:32 you're talking about should be happening right and it's not as easy as a company buying a design company to inject creativity into the company which a lot of companies are doing which is wonderful but so how does this way of problem driven work actually permeate the whole culture and not just formal education so how do we do trickle up to

00:47:02 defer to someone else I the class that I teach as I mentioned it's a January class and it's the best class because I don't have to grade them which I would just give them all A's if I had to I don't believe in grading for the Hampshire people in the room um but but also it's it's an intensive learning course and it takes place in no classroom at all we're in New York City and we go around to art science lectures to exhibits that engage design and technology we meet artists who are painting about the ocean we meet

00:47:33 scientists who are doing public outreach through comedy so I basically introduce my students to the real world of how cross-disciplinary works and then they bring that back to their siloed academia world and try and figure out how to keep that spirit within them I've only taught the class once it's a new program at Rutgers so I have yet to see the long term outcomes but I'm very interested in that because if we can't change academia maybe we can change students and then they can change academia what you're

00:48:05 doing in your class is basically taking the students out and giving them opportunities to reflect on a variety of subjects they don't have any experience like that's design thinking that's the that's the cycle maybe the opportunity to reflect is what will change workplace I think one of the best models we've actually seen a scene of integrating steam but also taking what would be considered more traditional education as often in rural places we work a lot in my I mean and what they've done over the

00:48:36 years instead of trying to continually reinvent education they've modified it a little bit but you still have chemistry you still have physics you still have history you have all of the classes but then you have a computer lab where they're learning about programming they're learning to operate programs like the Microsoft or Adobe products but then they have a synthesizing Center which is their steam lab so you take all of this knowledge you're getting from all of these different classes and you have a place to synthesize that information and work with it creatively

00:49:08 you mentioned plasticity before this implication that in a certain way the generation that will go through this kind of education will just be have a different brain will think differently their brain would work differently the association's they make would be different and so in a way you can't really tell what the outcome would be long term because you are modifying the whole way of thinking and so for

00:49:39 instance he really cannot become any more esteem result of Steve because he was his brain was formed the way my brain was formed where we had all these individual subjects this is a different ambition as well outcome I agree with you the brains of the young people today are going to be different than our brains that's always been the case because new new each generation has new

00:50:10 experiences you know and but I disagree that we can't change his brain I think we experience life time over an entire [Music] or conversation and we we as even as adults we experience plasticity over our entire lifetime we're never stuck it's complicated right so we still need specialists right when I go to the doctor I want the best educated focused doctors trying to figure out what's

00:50:42 going on in my body so somehow we've got to articulate the need for specialists with the need for a culture that thinks across all that stuff and it's a difficult problem is that that specialists having gone through this system would hopefully while being a specialist also have a different perspective on the whole nature of the

00:51:13 problem yeah I think that what you're talking about this is what we see in our younger students is that maybe you specialize in something but because you were exposed to all of these other things you're not so set and thinking that there's a black and white answer that there's only one way to think of thing but there's actually multiple ways to think of and maybe there's the best way to think of something or to solve a problem but for any problem we have there's a thousand different ways in

00:51:43 solving that problem and there's got to be more than one way yeah it's like we were talking last night about you know what transdisciplinary actually means you know what is something if it comes out of art and science but it's not art or science and then I think the steam educated people will will be the ones doing that well I think it's important you know in the future for because we need specialists and because people have preferences what you mentioned before

00:52:15 the idea of some people prefer to learn things visually or by tactile I think it's important for us all to recognize that we have the ability to understand many things but we actually choose we choose we could all learn equally well visually or tactile but we choose to pursue it in one primary way in early education the goal of educators is to expose students to a lot of different things so that they develop a wide range of skills it's okay as an adult to choose one but still recognize that the

00:52:46 people around you have also made a choice and that we need an environment that allows people to make as many possible choices so that we have doctors and lawyers lawyers okay nurses like we exactly scientists I think as people get older when I'm raising two teenage children and so one of the things that we struggle with constantly is not necessarily criticizing but trying to get our children to understand that everybody has weaknesses and you can

00:53:18 always go towards the easy thing which is the thing you excel at but if you're not constantly working on your weaknesses to them you're not a well-rounded person good I like to take the conversation in a totally different direction that that's right and since we're in a private space with nobody listening okay we're now in the culture

00:53:50 you know that how do children grow up in that culture where nothing is private there's a good steam problem know that the I just want to come back to the discussion on humanities and I part of me is frightened of what I'm about to talk about so please tolerate my anxiety so are the humanities inside or outside so I'm working with a group of people

00:54:22 led by ben shneiderman to organize a conference at the National Academy next March it's called revisiting cybernetics serendipity and jazia Weichert who organized that famous exhibition in 1968 one of the first shows gallery shows that really integrated emerging technologies that the artists that we're doing that the conference is funded by the Sackler foundation and probably many of you know

00:54:54 the Sackler foundation made a lot of its money because some of the brothers were involved in the pharmaceutical industry among other things they developed the marketing model of using doctors as marketing agents using direct marketing to patients to tell the doctor what to buy and our government has now declared a health crisis because of the opioid epidemic one person on the organizing

00:55:26 committee has now resigned because they did want having nothing to do with promoting the reputation of the Sackler foundation one of the invited speakers has said they may or may not come what is the steam way of dealing this you know it's really easy to criticize and say your money is dirty my money is clean well I don't think we live in that

00:55:56 kind of a binary world so how do we hold a conference accept the money from the Sackler foundation and it's not complicated long as you you know with once you start looking at it in a way where we think differently of how we might redesign the National Academy of Science redesign the National Academy of Engineering redesign the National Academy of Medicine so that this thinking about these problems is

00:56:27 integrated into science and engineering because typically what we do in universities is we give engineer's ethics courses oh that's someone else's specialty it's not my problem so what would be the steam approach to think about how you function in the real world where there is money that is less more clean and now I think what we're trying to do in steam is worth supporting and I'm delighted the Sackler

00:56:59 foundation is willing to support it so how do we get the humanities inside and how does a four year old or a five year old understand the consequences of what they're making so how do you teach a five-year-old to think about the consequences of what they're making I didn't need some time to think of it we're gonna sit with that one for a

00:57:29 little okay and I said I was frightened to raise it publicly but you know the humanities got left out of the steam acronym I don't think it was intentional it it was just steamy was easier to say than steamy but that I think we owe it to ourselves to it to address those kinds of issues within the steam discussion

00:58:01 [Music] [Music] to raise a question about a difference that you some of you have adumbrated between the polymath and the

00:58:31 transdisciplinary in' people who can do many things like Leonardo for example undoubtedly were benefiting from the ways in which those things inform the other things that they did something about the science of human flying may have had something to do with the composition of the Mona Lisa that's up to the land are expert to decide but it seems to me since in some ways I think steam or steam is pointing more toward

00:59:04 the transdisciplinary mind I just wanted to throw out the interesting example of partisan Eno when for example he experimented with what he called the convex mirror and undertook to make a self-portrait in a convex mirror which involved messing around Alberti had very recently established as the fundamental laws of perspective in other words even within a discipline

00:59:37 parmigianino was trying to find ways of complicating received attitudes toward the basis of the discipline and this involved as was said last night seeing things the same things in new ways and that seems to me to be to point toward a transdisciplinary model maybe this is just a statement or maybe it's something that some of the panelists would like to pick up thank you

01:00:10 I was gonna say we talk often about the Edison effect in our classroom where if you have 25 kids faced with the same problem you have 25 solutions to that problem and everybody's learning from each other and from those 25 solutions you have another 25 solutions because people are now starting to see the problem solved in different ways and being able to see what works what doesn't work and taking from those design models what they think are the best parts of it and then redesigning it

01:00:41 I think you've made a very useful distinction which we should discuss their own ebay between polymath II and transdisciplinary for me polymath II is indeed in this idea of the genius who's good at many things right and universities a structure to train geniuses my university counts how many Nobel Prize winners we have first disciplinary is a different problem how

01:01:12 do you train a group of people to behave in a way that's genius like and so that's a team activity it's transdisciplinary between people it's not training the individual to be a genius it's training the group of people to come up with solutions that no one of them could have done so let let let's keep that polymath II versus transdisciplinary hey that's very true that as you say keep it focused on the group your class yeah oh fantastic

01:01:46 discussion this morning I the the question about goals actually why why we're doing this so there's cross-disciplinary there's transdisciplinary there's there's there's there's lots of ways that that that we can approach it but there was a conference [Music]

01:02:17 can everybody hear me yes okay so there was there was a conference earlier this year that brought together many of the people that are here it's called the space between and I love that expression because what it actually refers to is that the there is this zone this domain that lies between around among and as much as anything else what I think is

01:02:49 really important is to not classify it or come up with rules of the road for it but to figure out how to strengthen it how to nurture it how it becomes a space that fosters co-creation because that's really what we're talking about when we talk about transdisciplinary we're specifically talking about the things that we can create together when we're talking about more transactional kinds of collaboration we're still talking about different types of co-creation

01:03:21 that are within this and I think one of the enormous challenges that Rogers identified here is that universities and in general our educational systems aren't exactly designed to be domains for co-creation they are designed to be places to accomplish very specific often linear trajectories that have been pre to pre designed how we deal with that is a pretty big question but I think that the more that we can kind of approach this from that spirit of fuzzy taxonomy

01:03:54 is space to co-create ultimately the more fruitful it'll will be so I feel like that was very worldly and now I'm gonna be very selfish my name is Oh my current PhD candidate at Georgetown University in the chemistry department and I'm curious will generalize how does one go through this kind of like blossoming educator experience in a way where I can kind of

01:04:27 create a that pushes me towards being a better both steamed individual and steam educator in this very as we've said specialized process obviously I need to follow through on NSF grants and please my p i-- etc but how can i also create collaborative experiences maybe with an artist or within my university or in outreach etc yeah and a lot of people

01:04:59 like you you want to you want to do more than one thing and you should be able to so my advice you would be wear multiple hats you know a scientist by day a performer by night you know I honestly know scientists who are stand-up comedians and musicians and do outreach and you know they're crazy busy but they love it that's what they want to be doing but you do have to carve your own path you have to seek out opportunities

01:05:30 which are maybe a little off the beaten path my position at Rutgers didn't exist before I got there it was just very good timing but there are more and more universities like we're talking about steam now is it's a popular thing universities just want to implement it they do not know how to do it so they bring Roger in from France or they you know bring me in from New York because there they a lot of them realizing you bring someone new they can't do with existing faculty or expect you know

01:06:00 existing faculty to be able to bear that burden of working across right so so look out for those two in an I bet I bet you'll find something and I would also add that at the National Academy of Sciences I'm involved in organizing the DC art science evening rendezvous program which is part of the lazer Network and we're in DC and we're bringing artists and scientists together around Broad seams and we just kind of see where the discussion goes we would

01:06:31 love to have you attend some of those events we have an open mic at the beginning of every program where anyone in the audience could talk a little bit about their work and their interests and that could be a good way for you to meet people that might be interested in collaborating thank you actually I went to Georgetown chemistry department got my master's degree from this nice

01:07:01 connection I'm in the humanities I teach philosophy history philosophy also science and the discussion of hybridity and also a question of standards is kind of rolling around in my mind and the humanities parts so basically I think of standards like they're stultifying I know I did some early work with NASA at the birth of the Internet they just the

01:07:32 the dawn of history and I was lucky enough to get a t1 connection which is what universities had many to my classroom because of a very generous NASA administrators totally luck and connections anyway I saw kids do really great things there that weren't at all science kids they just wanted to get a webpage that was their entire thing to be famous for for the dawn of history you know anyway the mixture of things to

01:08:06 me the word that stands out is metaphor at that point I did have to do a lot of things with standards I was teaching high school for a couple of years and NASA was very into education standards that were just starting to go up for that and whether it was a mission based the race to create the best acronym which is what NASA does a lot and who makes something that actually fits the standards so you can get the grants and get the connections with Department of Ed it never quite worked out every

01:08:37 one of those was not going to it's basically has an issue so what I think it was metaphor as sort of the the the come to the rescue here and what I mean by that is that it's sort of a meta standard and people who can think in terms of metaphor recognize metaphor utilize metaphor manipulate metaphor are very flexible and the earlier you do this the more and better you can do it without actually leaving your field so for example thinking about dendrites in the brain comes from trees and you know

01:09:09 the fellow last night I forget who was I was watching this on stream talked about streams and glass and the hosts all of that stuff is basically playing with words but every one of those words because they're technical words has an impact it has an entire set of technologies and ideas that come from that and having that flexibility just with metaphor of metaphor thinking which is poetic and artistic as well as very technical it's what we call vocabulary biology books are full of have too many

01:09:40 words on to be able to create metaphor and to recognize it in your own field I think is is a talent that kind of goes above and beyond all the different standards and yet has application to all of them not too heavy-handed and yet something worth exploring I'd love to hear more about can I just react to the metaphor thing so I hope someone's doing a would cloud of the woods being used by this new people over three days I have a PhD student working on applying metaphor theory to data visualization why the

01:10:12 hell do we make maps of data when the data is twenty dimensional so you know visualization we think in ways that comes from our real world when you're in the data world how do you think differently on how to represent the data and let me tell you that metaphors lock you into excluding all kinds of the ways of thinking about how you represent data and what are artists at

01:10:44 good at representing their experiences among other things sharing their experiences with other people how do you share a data world with other people and so I think the metaphor theory is a really good sort of instrument for some of this discussion sorry I cut you off i I'm Kimberly Schwab I come from science and I had a passion for history and philosophy of science but now I teach middle school science and one of

01:11:15 the things I've been concerned about with with steam is this humanities how does it fit in because it's a little bit awkward and so much of steam has been sold it seems as like kind of this technology like art will make you solve problems better and it does it is a beautiful thing but but science is is bigger than that and I guess one of the things that I've been trying to work with it is this integration of humanities as much more about the questions we ask I mean how can we be more creative yes bring in art but if we want to understand how how science makes

01:11:48 a claim about anything how does the scientific community change their mind through big revolutions or small that's where you can't I mean I can't talk about you know evolution without Darwin and Agassiz and the fight about slavery in the Civil War I mean it's just like if that's the goal and that that whole goal of like how do you change your ma how do you as an individual change your mind and how does the scientific community change their mind that happens to solve other problems too that are really really

01:12:18 important but I don't I haven't seen that in a lot of the stem conversation so then there's this so there's the questions you ask also in terms of speaking - last night - in terms of this relationship between art and science I think of teaching science as an opportunity for students to behold the beauty of the world not just aesthetically but the way scientists recognize beauty and that that's a like we want students to appreciate the joy of literature but like to appreciate the

01:12:50 beauty of the earth and also this this adventure in science that led us to this other type of beauty and then so there's the questions you ask and then there's the methodology and one thing one way I've worked with integrating humanities into the science curriculum and I don't see it very much is is theater by actually teaching I mean one example is teaching a play informed consent recent play but teaching genetics and evolution in the context of that play sitting with the play as we're working through it and

01:13:22 then the kids come away with I mean back to the question about what what do we want them to come away with one thing I'm just really happy about and I didn't I was thinking about teaching genetics and evolution but what they came away with this very powerful sense of ethics and that's gone into you know sort of like this is complicated and this is which you can't get with their little sidebar in ethics you kind of have to sit with that for a while so I guess I'm just wondering why these questions aren't that I don't see it in STEM

01:13:55 literature like this this kind of respect maybe I'm just weird but that's the way I see it I mean I love stem I don't like the name um but but this integration with humanities there's so many more possibilities and it's not just like a little tack a little history on it's embedded in the in the process so one thing that I always sort of struggle with when I'm teaching is the eye is my bias the idea of how do I take something that's just information

01:14:25 today's temperature yesterday's temperature a decade of temperature and now put it through my filter to make it into data and then share my data with everybody else so that we can make this knowledge that we're going to use to shape policy or something it's really hard because it's hard for me to get rid of my bias without talking to other people about there's one thing that's coming to mind what the whole time I heard you talk was I'm working with the Bronx Hill School District and they were concerned about it how many students

01:14:56 were pursuing advanced science for a number of reasons but all calm was we designed a project that engages every in their school district from kindergarten through ninth grade in a five-year research project examining the health of the Bronx Reverend we talked to the students at the beginning and end of every year what is science what is the work of a scientist how does science benefit you personally our community and the thing that's coming out two years into the project as students are saying science is about interconnectedness science is about how the information

01:15:28 that I gather can be used not just for the people in my school because the other students are sharing my information and using it as data but now we're sharing it at the village level we're sharing it at the state level we're talking to other people who have rivers in their communities who want to study it similarly and to me that interconnectedness this gets back to the philosophy in the humanities I mean this is sort of why we artists write down their ideas and why people have written novels it's interconnectedness I think you're right on and so the question that

01:16:00 is how we make our implicit biases explicit now obviously you don't spend a hundred percent of your time doing that but everything has a implicit bias right so this is a really good thing for putting liquids in if it's the only tool you got you're gonna study studying error this is the wrong thing so every scientific method has implicit biases on what can be studied and can't be studied sometimes it's oh we don't have the math to even create a simulation of it yet right and when you couldn't get the

01:16:31 climate change there's no equation of climate change it's a different kind of thing that we need to come up with to explain and study climate change and so somehow how the humanities get embedded in the way of thinking it is you know it's we've built a society that doesn't do that and yeah we tagged on the ethics on the side but we don't think what are our implicit biases individually or as a group or as a tool what is it allow us to study what is not

01:17:04 allow us to study what can we understand what can't we understand so I think you're right on so is anyone here ever heard of the show MythBusters mm hmm hmm so for those of you don't know there was basically two engineers who worked in the film industry and they addressed questions such as what cockroaches actually survived a nuclear war and or did pirates wear a patch over one eye so they could navigate space and

01:17:35 the answer was no cockroaches wouldn't survive and two actually wearing an eyepatch does allow you to walk around at night almost immediately and so you can very intuitively see where this type of integration of steam thinking exists an Adam Savage one of the two engineers one of my favorite quotes from that work that applies in my life every day is the difference between screwing around and science is writing it down so early on in the conversation we're talking about like what is the core curriculum that we should be promoting and steam and

01:18:06 basically in education in general to me is writing things down and so a lot of people I really enjoy the the critical mass of whole skins here today but I think having that culture of writing things down on multiple layers someone being methodical about it and actually looking back at what you wrote and like constituting of knowledge and reintegrating read I jesting and re-evaluating how to pursue more knowledge and the science and the arts might look different if fundamentally is exactly the same and so to me imagining

01:18:38 what curriculum would be like from a K through 12 and continuing education format would be you know distinguishing qualitative and quantitative data so in the scientific you know traditional scientific scenario you know this is how you make a bar graph this is a difference between correlation and causation this is a p-value versus for an artist it's appreciating form and line and context and so in my personal experience when I was in high school we had inquiry skills which was freshman year course so like how do we get the

01:19:09 data and then as juniors we studied theory of knowledge and so you know and I'm now a molecular biologist and so when you think about long-term training you learn about the central dogma like five times before you actually apply it so this idea of you have to reach a certain age of training in order to be methodical in digesting information I think you know like where do we have the time in the space and I was like well we learned all these other principles five

01:19:39 times before we do experimental work so with that in mind what do you personally think is an essential skill for students to have so for example studying how do you actually structure a lab notebook how do you actually structure an artistic portfolio and being able to do both of those things allows you to do the semi-improvised play that is the true nature of stem thinking so like in your personal life like for me I think for many artists and scientists the importance of writing things down

01:20:10 immediately after you have that thought so you guys want to talk about that I think I'll go ahead I think you just said it I think it's making your thinking visible yeah what I pull this is process documentation which is so much easier than it used to be click so how do you document your thinking and show it to other people let's do it in one way sign is do it in

01:20:41 a different way externalizing or your thinking processes writing it down which is the United is he doing with 18th century technology I think is an important skill of how you externalize what you are thinking about we're trying to do share it with other people as a methodology to to finding solutions hello everybody I came from

01:21:18 Brazil with my two colleagues here and we worked for more than 20 years with the bringing science and arts together especially for education so that's a subject that interests me and very much sorry for my English I will make many arrows but I want to pass the two ideas the first is that I am to ask you about other experience here in the US about educating educators because when we talk for the large mass of the education

01:21:53 system the universities are the elementary school there is very difficult because it's completely already established and and boxes everything so to to foster an integrative curriculum and an interdisciplinary curriculum those experience is very difficult however when it when we deal with teachers that will have all their lives 20 years 30 years behind it behind to work on these

01:22:30 subjects they are extremely avid for changing things so in our experience with 20 years giving courses for teachers and educators in all no subjects I came from the the health the health environment I'm a man : I am a scientist with developing new medicines for neglected disease so in my Institute as when we received educators is just too educated for life brought in

01:23:02 a broad sense so the experience of putting of mixing interdisciplinary groups of teachers in short curriculum of 40 to 45 hour course for instance change very very strongly their way as they do things in their own professional space so I would like very much to to share with you other experience like that and how we can challenge how we can

01:23:37 solve the challenge of jumping from the small scale practice to a large scale practice in large countries like a US Canada in Brazil for instance that's the question how to jump thank you I can address that a little bit and I would say in this country it's a little bit harder in education just because we have standards and not that standards are bad but every every state

01:24:08 defines those standards differently every school district again defines how the state's defining those standards differently if you're an expeditionary school or a British primary school again you're getting these these standards that come from the state and then to the school district and then to your educational group everybody has their own learning and objectives and what we find in the classroom is that these standards and all of this implementation is rather schizophrenic

01:24:39 it doesn't really correlate it doesn't tie together it's very hard for teachers every year to be adapting what they're doing and be able to achieve these bigger goals I guess I just expand to teach the teachers to learn to learn so it's probably going to take us 50 years to figure out how this stupid thing changes the way we could learn things we're sort of in the Stone Age of this whatever this is giving me access to and so yeah we teach differently but we need

01:25:10 to learn differently and I think it's going to take us 50 years to figure out how it teach differently but also how to learn differently so good morning my name is Nick Church I'm a scientist and I just wanted to say that I thought they're there you guys shouldn't be so hard on yourself so I'm a Brit as you can probably tell and I've worked and lived in America for a couple of years previously but now I'm in in Britain I've worked in

01:25:41 universities in both and in China and I think you shouldn't be too hard on the current state of US education I don't know if you know but in Britain we specialized quite a lot earlier and this has gives us some advantages but in my experience American students in university American students in grad school they have good broad education they can see trans discipline they're much better informed than British

01:26:12 undergraduates beyond their speciality and I think that's really valuable the downside is it takes longer to educate them but I just you know I don't really have anything deep or meaningful today I just want to say don't be too negative about the current state of the US university education because as far as I can see from having a slightly different perspective it's doing a pretty good job already it doesn't mean it can't do better but it's doing a pretty good job certainly this conversation is not limited to the United States steam is

01:26:44 everywhere in various forms okay so what's next so um if you all will bear with us for the next one minute we are going to have a short artistic visual interlude to this conversation Cynthia Panucci will make her way over this direction so you guys on this side of the room if you want to just do this fun like rotate your chair around thing points for the person who's most creative about how this is or you can just turn your body around in the chair so we're gonna here just for the next 10

01:27:18 minutes or so about some of the most impressive and interesting art projects that deal with science that Cynthia has graciously gathered for us and then following that we'll have a coffee break before the next round table I just want to say to round table participants please make sure that you are back here at 11:25 thank you [Music]