About the STEMarts Curriculum Tool
The STEMarts Curriculum Tool is a free hybrid online platform that provides STEAM activities and resources to be used at an array of educational and sci-art events. Featured artists and interdisciplinary collectives share their processes--which inherently integrate science and technology with their diverse creative, cultural and academic backgrounds--and thus create powerful stories that will directly inspire and engage our youth. The platform is built around the artist's work and includes teacher tools such as student surveys and standard alignments. STEAM wikis harness the collective knowledge available online with curated activities and resources. Each artist page or project is designed to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21). This hybrid educational platform enhances and deepens the educational experience while bringing cutting-edge STEAM resources to your classroom.
How it works
You will see three events on the home page; PASEO, ISEA2012 and BioSTEAM which is our most recent program. Note that each event has many artists and in some cases like The PASEO festival, several years of content. Each page includes information about the artist and the unique installation that they created for the sci-art event. Scroll down to the Design Tool which takes you through the process of how to incorporate the artist page and resources as a classroom project. The correlating STEAM wiki contains all the STEAM activities, research articles and resources for that artist's unique topic or medium of exploration. The Teacher Tools section provides teacher resources that explain new terms introduced through this program, student surveys and handouts to assist with developing lessons and projects around the content.
About the STEMarts Model
The STEMarts Lab mission is to design immersive and educational sci-art experiences that empower youth and communities through art, science and technology. We deliver innovative sci-art installations, STEAM programming, online curriculum tools, teacher training and professional development to schools, art/science organizations and festivals.
The STEMarts Model was created in 2009 by artist, Agnes Chavez through the STEMarts research project which later became, STEMarts Lab, a New Mexico corporation in the process of becoming a non-profit 501c3. The goal was to combine art, science and technology to explore real world challenges through creative expression as a way to inspire and activate our youth leaders. The STEMarts Curriculum Tool was first developed in 2012 for the International Symposium of Electronic Arts: ISEA2012 Machine Wilderness. The heart of the STEMarts methodology is the way we build projects around artists and their unique way of knowing and communicating ideas through the integration of art, science and technology. STEMarts Lab continues as a research and development project by applying the latest science research and technological innovations to arts education through interdisciplinary collaborations.
STEMarts Lab CORE ETHOS
The future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed – William Gibson
- We build educational tools around the work of cutting edge artists and scientists to bring their work into classrooms that normally would not have access to these exciting new ideas.
- We provide participating artists with a new contextual framework for their work where teachers and students can delve deeply into their artistic vision, process and research.
- We prioritize intercultural exchange and collaboration and design culturally responsive programming.
- We are guided by ‘21st century thinking’ with a focus on inner well-being, ethics and social practice toward a peaceful and sustainable future.
- We investigate the latest science research and technologies to inform our design practice and curricula for our future leaders.
- We are committed to closing the gap between the “knowledge rich” and “knowledge poor” which can lead to economic disparity.
- We focus on community outreach to make STEAM programming accessible to underrepresented minorities and girls. Workshop participants must be representative of the socio-economic and cultural diversity of the community they serve.
- We are engaged in the transition from being passive consumers of technology to problem solvers and critical thinkers, investigating the social, environmental and global impact of the tools we are using.
Methodology
The STEMarts Education Model is based on carefully designed media-rich workshops, online tools, hands-on demos or community interventions built on instruction with four design pillars that revolve around the core principle that all content must make a connection to self, society and the natural world as an interdependent ecosystem. The chart below provides a visual illustration of the key components that guide all the activities and intended outcomes.
