Steam curriculum: Arts Education As An Integral Part Of Interdisciplinary Learning

Disciplinary-based Understanding 

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Furthering this discussion in another qualitative account, Guyotte, Kellam, 
Constantino, and Sochaka (2015) shared a collection of narratives from art education 
students’ experiences with “disciplinary-based understandings of creative thinking” in the 
aforementioned Transdisciplinary Design Studio (p. 2). The authors used a visual-verbal 
method of research in order to collect findings on the students’ experiences and 
perceptions of creativity via visual journals, focus groups, and a reflective paper (Guyotte 
et al., 2015, p. 3, 9). The purpose of this study was to determine co-equal benefits for 
STEM students as well as the Arts students when utilizing a STEAM curriculum 
(Guyotte et al., 2015, p. 6). Some of the questions that the students were asked include: 
“What are the most significant things you learned? How has this knowledge affected the 
manner in which you perceive or approach problems? How do you envision applying this 
knowledge to future experiences in your profession?” (Guyotte et al., 2015, p. 13). This 
study shows that there was a prominent theme regarding the battle of process versus 
product, because our education systems create a mentality of completion for the grade as 
opposed to focusing on the process of achieving the product. One of the participants 
stated that she, “…observed, firsthand, how people from different disciplines can interact 
together and solve problems…” (Guyotte et al., 2015, p. 28). The authors termed this 
trend as collaborative or distributed creativity, “… where the goal was the generation of a 
shared, yet unpredictable creative product” (Guyotte et al., 2015, p. 29). Reflections 
from the interdisciplinary groups of students determined that creativity was a common 
language in which the students were able to utilize and collaborate across disciplines 
(Guyotte et al., 2015, p. 30). Overall, Guyotte et al. (2015) claimed that these student 

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experiences demand a reexamination of pedagogy “…in order to thoughtfully orchestrate 
collaborative and creative learning” (Guyotte et al., 2015, p. 31).