I have not read the whole thread bu has any one made the connection to STEAM punk to STEAM education…
Frankly I see all things as Art… a well made motor is art to me… you cannot seperate art in to a tower it surrounds every aspect of our life weather one acknoleges it or not…
No joke, somebody in my school district wants to turn STEAM into STREAM, because we need to push Reading across the curriculum.
But on the positive side, PLTW has a modified version of their Intro to Engineering Design class approved as a fine art course in California because there is so much drawing and sketching required.
Your school district does include elementary schools, right? If it doesn’t, THEN I’d be concerned.
Just wait until schools keep adding to STEM for buzzword purposes and eventually it just becomes every subject in taught in schools.
We’re a high school district.
And yes, I’ve seen/heard “Steam” used to describe an English teachers PowerPoint.
I need to actually attend some of these meetings.
We have plenty of artsy kids and adults on our team. We have four team divisions (Robot, Strategy, Imagery, Financial) and we like to focus a lot of time and energy on our artistic presentation. Probably way more than most teams, since we re-theme every year. I still kind of cringe at STEAM, and I agree that it (and STEM, probably) will become a meaningless term soon. It’s just a passing catchphrase for administration and promotional materials on one side, and a watered down concept that includes ever type of education on the other.
The Denver School of Science and Technology hasn’t even been able to get a teacher to show up to their robotics team (meetings or competitions) in more than a decade, let alone get a staff sponsor. I love that team but that has been galling.
I think it’s important to go to the source on these types of discussions. Harvey White coined the term STEAM. In this op. ed by Harvey White, he talks about art as a necessary component of innovation, that a STEM education, devoid of art won’t create the innovation that we need out of our graduates. Basically, our goal in educating the next generation isn’t to create a bunch of STEM robots, because then we find ourselves in the same problem we’re in right now, which is that we don’t have enough new jobs for people. To Harvey, art is the creativity to create the future.
I think he’s kind of right. When we put people through the FIRST progression of programs, yes, we want them to be Scientists, Technologists, Engineers, and Mathematicians, but we want more than that, we want them to be the type of Scientists, Technologists, Engineers, and Mathematicians who won’t tolerate the status quo and will build the future. The type of Engineers we aim to build is not the ones robotically sitting at a desk all day writing documentation, although that is a possible career path for an Engineer. We want the type of Engineers who would make a program to write the documentation for them, do the impossible, and bring on a new era of human prosperity. I think Leadership more accurately conveys the concept, but that looks awful in an acronym. STELM? No thanks.
There are a lot of important concepts that are taught in this kind of program; you can always add another letter! With your L and the aforementioned R, we get ARMLETS.
I think that at a certain length the acronym starts to lose some impact. When it can no longer fit on a Scrabble board we have definitely passed that limit.
I don’t see this as a slippery slope kind of deal. Instead, I think it’s expanding the acronym to finally encompass the full scope of product design. Our students are going off to work in auto companies, architecture, smartphone design, you name it. Each of these fields use not just Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, but art.
The products that succeed are the ones that are not just technical masterpieces, but visual ones as well. This is a large part of how Apple (arguably) passed all other phones in terms of ubiquity in the United States. They’re not much better or worse than their competitors, tech-wise. But their ad campaigns and general look set the aesthetic standard for other phones to follow.
In conclusion, since we’re training our students for careers in tech, we can’t forget that arts are a big part of it.
If the ‘A’ in “STEAM” is what gives us Apple’s particular aesthetically-slick-but-totally-opaque philosophy of UI design, I like it even less 
Honestly, though, I just don’t buy this - this certainly isn’t how the term appears to be used with any consistency. As it stands, I don’t see what academic subjects (save for perhaps history) wouldn’t qualify as “STEAM,” and that’s a fatal problem with the term.
Nothing happens in a vacuum. You can’t just be a math whiz to be an engineer (as I am sure you know). I do see it as a slippery slope. Would you agree that you also need to have communication skills to be a good engineer, too? I would say so, but that doesn’t mean that it needs to be added to the STEM acronym. I believe that the acronym exists solely to group similar fields, not to say what you need to be a good product designer or even engineer. A good engineer (or scientist, or mathematician) should not limit themselves to the fields provided to them by some arbitrary acronym like ‘STEM’.
Up to discussion of course, but that is my personal opinion :D.