Education (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee)
Amidst a modern world that seems to exponentially increase its demands for instant gratification, STEAM.org endeavors to become a think tank and applied research leader in diligently shifting the instructional paradigm through an educational movement. STEAM is rooted in strategically integrating the Arts into Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math curricula. We want to emphasize that to us STEAM, as a concept, is about application and putting STEM content in context while constantly iterating contextual narratives based on student response.
In doing so, secondary and post-secondary students can actually identity and develop viable skill sets towards expertise and eventual mastery within their own world of passion. Hence, STEAM: Create Your Passion! STEAM is about designing a dynamic and responsive system of education that experientially teaches not only how to live but make a living and thereby fostering responsible student-citizens for life. Our organizational objectives aim to go beyond impacting education in itself, but moreover how society functions at large. Members of society can collectively perceive that life-long learning is catalyzed by mindfully processing life experiences.
Simply put, we aim to deinstitutionalize the idea of learning only when in school, but that life experiences, and resulting key emotional triggers, are true causes of effective learning. While schooling is supposed to allow us to process and better internalize future interactions so that we can organize, catalogue, reproduce, reapply, and effectively communicate such experiences; the proverbial meaning of STEM; a backbone. The “A” puts things in context; and creates the proverbial omniscient STEAM that is equally as abstract, yet undeniably strong, as love.
Keeping this in mind allows us to recognize that true measures of individual success are based on human impact and acceptance, camaraderie, and increasing relative quality of life within one’s respective social circles; which are increasing due to the effects of technology on globalization and is ironically leading to a loneliness phenomenon.
The results of such systematic reform can be so immense that generations from now the very notion of school shootings, public bombings, suicide, and even rape will seize to formulate and no person will ever be shackled to debt for pursuing a higher education, let alone happiness.
On a cognitive basis the arts elicits emotions which develops empathy and leads to intrinsic motivation, thereby enhancing long-term memory, leading to skills identification due to repetitive application, leading to critical thinking, meta-cognition, problem solving, emotional intelligence, expertise, mastery, harmonized group dynamics among master apprentices which leads to heightened social intelligence and eventually a balanced and responsive society.
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