STEAM Teaching and Learning Through the Arts and Design

Book excerpt: In this book, award-winning art educator Debrah C. Sickler-Voigt offers user-friendly, approachable strategies for STEAM planning, instruction, and assessment to help cultivate PK-12 students’ full potential, and draws from wide-ranging artists and designers to help you develop inspired, creative approaches to teaching STEAM in your classroom. Beginning with the basics and best practices of STEAM planning, instruction, and assessment, Sickler-Voigt then encourages readers to move full steam ahead with chapters based around diverse contemporary and historical artists and designers. In helping you to explore the interdisciplinary connections between Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics, Sickler-Voigt identifies strategies to build off from STEM subjects to form authentic, well-designed, and age-appropriate learning tasks that encourage your students to make deep connections and learn subject matter in context through art media and technologies. Each chapter includes flexible, choice-based classroom resources—with tips for adapting to different grade levels—and STEAM amplifiers, which fuse contextual learning on artists and designers with real-world STEAM topics to spark student learning and ignite creative approaches to planning, instruction, and assessment. Featuring 150 visually stunning, full-color images, this book fuses tried-and-true best practices with highly applicable instructional models inspired by artists and STEAM professionals, ideal for PK-12 teachers and STEAM specialists.