Steam, an economic policy and not a methodology

Kristóf Fenyvesi

One of the speakers that will be featured at the event is Kristóf Fenyvesi, an education researcher at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland and vice-president of the world’s largest maths and arts community, the Bridges Organisation. According to Fenyvesi his research focuses on finding connections between maths, arts and design in education. “I try to support teachers of mathematics, arts and design to work together with teachers of other subjects and to involve their students in the process of selecting the topic and designing their learning process,” he says.

Africa's first Steam Symposium adds art to Stem

27 Jul 2017

Below Fenyvesi elaborates on why the integration of art and design to traditional Stem subjects (maths, science and technology) is so important. He also shares why South African youth can benefit from the symposium and his vision for the future of 'Steam education'.

Please tell us how you became involved with the Open Design Cape Town Festival's Steam Symposium.

We do a lot of workshops all around the world and when we met at a conference with Dr Celia Booyse, a prominent curriculum researcher from South Africa, she connected us with Open Design Cape Town Festival's programme director, Suné Stassen. As I know from our discussions with Stassen and Booyse, and also learned from my recent visit to Nelson Mandela University, South African society and education is on the one hand facing big challenges, but on the other hand, holding huge, still unexplored potential.

Fenyvesi with some of his students.

Many disadvantages can be turned into advantages by developing integrative awareness and restablishing learning on creative and collaborative problem-solving, which has the capacity to engage students to actively embrace each other's culture, especially through art and design, as part of their own personal learning process. We have decided to give the floor to these ideas at this year's Festival, by promoting Open Design's impact on science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics Steam education. Together with my Steam-expert colleague, Ho Gul Park from Seoul, Korea, where Steam education is one of the most successful among the innovative learning practices, we are very glad to come to Cape Town and contribute to the festival and to the current educational discussions in South Africa.

Practice creativity with confidence

Juanita Pienaar  7 Aug 2017

Steam adds the creativity and vision of art and design thinking to the traditional Stem (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) subjects. Why is this integration necessary?

There is a growing gap between the increasingly technological, networked social systems and the people, who have real access to the opportunities provided by these. Getting more access through learning and diminishing the gap is not mainly about becoming able to enjoy more benefits provided by civilisation, but rather to gain individual and social capability and confidence to develop and radically change cultural practices. Real learning is shaping culture by sharing tools and related knowledge. Learning art and design that goes hand-in-hand with sciences can recognise the personal, social and cultural potentials of your studies, to maintain the link between information and imagination. It encourages self-expression, develops criticism and makes you prepared to break new paths, and to experiment by taking higher risks. Currently, we are living in a result-oriented world, although a big part of our results has contributed to our problems. It would be better to watch the process. Restablishing Stem integration on the arts and design can also help us to rediscover the hidden values in the process-aspect of learning and living.