An Interdisciplinary View of Education in the Formal and Natural Sciences – From STEM to STREAM to …

Thomas J. Marlowe, Katherine G. Herbert

STEM is increasingly a focus for education, from primary school through post-secondary (university) level. It is increasingly recognized and critically important, academically, economically, socially, and politically. At the pre-collegiate level, programs have responded to recommendations for the inclusion of the arts and consideration of medicine and the health sciences, yielding STEAM, or in parochial or religiously affiliated schools, STREAM. However, engaging in this STEM, STEAM, STREAM construct can be complicated and costly in classic business, industry and academic structures. It requires key personnel willing to collaborate, fuzzy collaboration structures which can be hard to granularize in the classical silos, and often a vision of understanding how to coordinate and integrate multiple views on a project. In this article, we consider other complementary disciplines and perspectives, including interdisciplinarity and diversity. While some affect primary and secondary education, our main emphasis is on post-secondary undergraduate education in the STEM disciplines, and on approaches to address those concerns within the constraints of a typical major in the STEM disciplines, and also on implications for team structures in STEM enterprises and research.

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