What are STEAM proponents thinking? on creativity, excellence, and measurement

Paul Woodford

Auteurs-es

Paul Woodford Western University, Canadá.

Mots-clés :

STEAM, Democracy, Measurement, Creativity, Neoliberalism

Résumé

Music and art educators worry that neoliberal education reform has rendered their educational programs more vulnerable to declining enrolments and possible eventual elimination from schools and universities. This is in part owing to the linkage of neoliberal education with the knowledge economy and associated assessment practices based on numerical measurement that relegate the arts and humanities to the periphery of education. In response to these developments, some teachers have sought to strengthen the perceived social status and security of their programs by aligning them with the STEM curriculum. Hence the acronym STEAM including Arts. This paper, however, presents an argument that the arts in the STEAM curriculum remain only secondary to the STEM subjects because primarily conceived as means of helping to improve STEM outcomes. Moreover, by catering to the STEM curriculum, those teachers may be stripping the arts of many of their social and communicative competences that, as philosopher John Dewey (1934) contended, made the arts important modes of political thought and action that afforded opportunities for the reconstruction and revitalization of democratic society.

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Biographie de l'auteur-e

Paul Woodford, Western University, Canadá.

Professor Dr. do Departamento de Educação Musical da Don Wright Faculty of Music, Western University, Londres, Ontário.

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