Hybrid Lab Network

Reflecting on STEAM at the departing point

by with No Comment Hybrid Lab NetworkOpinionSTEAM

Article by: Maria Manuela Lopes

Hybrid Lab Network (HYBRID) results from the desire of a group of academics, researchers and artists that in their own fields and institutions have been experimenting to stretch the teaching/learning boundaries and our group willingness to explore how to create a new way of envisioning how a transformation of higher education institutional practices might be possible. We aim to contribute to institutional change, not as a legislative policy innovation yet, but as something that will possibly happen organically and in consequence of the educational alternatives that are needed and Hybrid (and maybe you) will contribute to providing. For me, one of the central challenges in this project is to imagine, create, and generate performances of interdisciplinary and participatory STEAM development in traditional educational settings, exploring differing scenarios, participants and non-formal learning settings (Biohack Academy).

 

STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) is a recent educational framework that aims to bring the ‘real world’ with its complexity into the classroom, by connecting different subjects together in a way that they will relate to both the daily and professional world and to each other. STEAM derives from STEM education, in which the artistic, the critical thinking processes and design-related skills where introduced into a student-centered active learning process. STEAM education provides an opportunity to explore an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary teaching/learning environment, showing the relationships between subjects and real-life, therefore increasing a sense of purpose in the explored subjects and increasing students motivation, self-efficacy and problem-solving skills. These seams thrilling and promising, but how to really do it in a discipline centred Higher Education system in its three cycles seems a herculean task.

Although, many examples of STEAM education can be found in all levels of teaching prior to University, examples in the Higher Education seam scarce and promoted in a few cases of pilot modules, or workshops around the world.  At a time when educators, educational researchers, and policymakers are trying to figure out, how to use traditional knowledge acquisition methods of education to create STEAM modules in Education, we are concerned with transforming learning environments in Higher Education scenarios into ones that are exploratory, developmental, participatory and interdisciplinary.  In recent decades, smaller-scale projects and experiments, led by artists or interdisciplinary teams, take into consideration and respond  to where and how knowledge is produced and contribute to more distributed networks of knowledge. In addition, ever-expanding boundaries of art as a field of activity encompass experiments where aesthetics reframe power dynamics, create interdisciplinary, experiential, and aesthetically driven student learning situations and look to holistic approaches to address complex systems.

 

My personal experience in institutional settings such as universities and research institutes is that the rules sometimes make it seem impossible to attempt any change, but as an artist, a curator and an adventurous academic, I find that with creativity it is possible to play within (and with) the rules. During the development of the HYBRID project, the teaching-learning activities (Hybrid Labs for higher education staff and students and also invited experts and anybody that applies in two open public occasions) will explore and co-construct STEAM style exercises where participants will be defied to innovate, to work collaboratively in different workspaces in modalities that should be challenging, sharing ideas, ethic boundaries and intuitions facilities with others, in an international stimulating environment. This looks very appealing, but will it be possible? Hybrid Labs were conceived for participants from different subject areas, countries and institutions to share ideas and space-time propelling cross-disciplinary dialogue, inquiry, and problem-solving issues they encounter in the university path. Together we will question whether these issues may be treated through a STEAM approach in order to contribute to the development of teaching toolkits, pilot modules and good practices situations.

Many examples of Art/Science/Technology collaboration have shown that arts permeate society in intellectual and cultural life and serve to instil forums for questioning, redefining, and offering new visions of the relationship between science/technology and society. As an artist and academic, I am personally engaged in exploring the role of art as a process and as a form of inquiry. In a STEAM educational experimental setting, this has great potential for artists but also for scientists, engineers, academics and institutions as they have to negotiate complex fields and may lean on the essential role and nature of art and designs strategies in interdisciplinary learning, across time and in a wide range of contexts.

My recent years of interdisciplinary practice and the current quarantine situation made me aware that it is vital to engage the public in science, engineering and technology as cultural tools that can address the complex questions of our time. Art is a process of inquiry and a way of knowing that may scaffold this engagement.  The STEAM approach became a way of constructing opportunities for creating toolkits for ‘bridging’ development to happen within educational institutions, both formal and informal, exploring the arts and the creative methodologies as a tool for interpretation and understanding.

The HYBRID team consider STEAM learning environments to foster equity, cross-disciplinary communication and co-creation as a core design principle. Our hybrid Labs will generate spaces where creation is not dissociated from subjectivity and human ways of being which are shaped situated knowledge, social interactions, human ideologies, cultures, systems, and structures of power.  By promoting the hybrid labs, public workshops and dissemination events, a growing number of people will engage in conversations exploring ideas about learning and teaching and how a STEAM like an approach may provide opportunities to search for solutions to problems outside of the disciplinary paradigms each works in. I claim that academic life in order to become more integrated with empathic qualities towards society, economy and politics, needs more than an inter and transdisciplinary turn. HYBRID departs from the standpoints that academia might need to embrace non-formal learning strategies and partnerships as part of an extended future policy, and that non-formal learning environments entice learning practices that are much more creative and produce new transdisciplinary knowledge. HYBRID is exploring these possibilities and decision-making structures should be part of this journey, so stakeholders are invited to participate.

 

HYBRID will explore ways of getting closer to a scenario where higher education students acquire the communication desire and intellectual curiosity that through creative strategies and collaborative approaches, will entice students, professors and researchers in developing solutions to this fluctuating global challenges. The hybrid team hopes to demonstrate the transformative power of conceiving a STEAM like an approach as a social and educational practice that sustains the developing interest, awareness, and commitment to ideas related to other areas of knowledge outside the core field of education that a student is following.

At this starting point, I wonder, if we (hybrid team) will be able to transcend the workshop model, and implement useful tools for collaborative planning, development and assessing STEAM-related education situations. At the inception of the project development I am certain Hybrid Lab Network has already contributed to the creation of a growing network that connects artists, scientists, educators, researchers and others, committed to explore the role of art and creativity as inquiry in interdisciplinary learning environments and other models yet to come.  I am willing to observe, as the project evolves, how we as educators and researchers transform our relationships to learning, teaching, interdisciplinary knowledge, and our relationships to each other. In writing this reflection, I acknowledge that my approach has been more creative and wishful than academic, possibly due to my biased position as an artist who has been creating and collaborating beyond the disciplinary boundaries for quite a while, or to my present condition as an isolated human seeking and hoping for a different tomorrow.

Nonetheless I perceive Hybrid Lab Network has a great opportunity to acknowledge, that maybe it is time to change prospective and instead of searching for responses to old problems in learning at academia, we might need to create new questions to the new problems we as Human, in constant need of learning, face.