STEAM education: An opportunity to transcend gender and disciplinary norms in early childhood?

Abstract

STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) education is currently gaining ground in many parts of the world, particularly in higher stages of the educational system. Foreseeing a development of STEAM policy and research also in the early years, this colloquium seeks to bring questions of gendering processes to the table. The authors aspire to prevent the development of a gender-blind STEAM discourse for early childhood education. Instead, they encourage practitioners and researchers to make use of STEAM education to recognise and transcend gendered norms connected to children’s being and learning in the arts, STEM and STEAM.

STEAM education, which means that the arts are combined with the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines, is an emerging paradigm for education in many parts of the world. Policies promote STEAM education as an arena for developing knowledge and knowers beyond current disciplines, preparing students for the complex roles needed in the future (Allina, 2018; European Committee of the Regions, 2019). The rationale for STEAM education is often oriented towards what society needs in terms of general skills for citizens, and particularly in terms of students choosing STEM careers to secure society's need for engineers, scientists and mathematicians who are able to solve the challenges of the future (Allina, 2018; Pirrie, 2019). STEM has often been portrayed as a leaky pipeline, referring to the fact that we ‘loose’ students, especially girls, from STEM at all stages of the education system (e.g. Van den Hurk et al., 2019). One of the arguments behind integrating the arts and STEM is to motivate more students to choose STEM careers and, in many STEAM policies and programmes, girls are a target group (European Committee of the Regions, 2019; Ng and Fergusson, 2020).

Research on higher levels of the education system has shown that gendering processes affect students’ possibilities to learn and choose careers in both the arts and STEM. Typically, boys have a narrower space for being and learning in the arts (e.g. Risner, 2007), whereas girls have a narrower space for being and learning in STEM – for example, girls have to balance their identity and behaviour, avoiding feminine expressions, to be able to be recognised as ‘scientific’ in school (Archer et al., 2012). The question of how gendering processes affect young children's possibilities to learn and identify with the arts and STEM is underexplored in the early childhood education context. Studies ranging over three decades have shown that gendering processes do affect children's everyday life in early childhood education settings (Blaise, 2014; Davies, 1989; Lappalainen and Odenbring, 2020), but most of these studies have focused on social relations and not on children's being and learning in relation to academic disciplines. Nevertheless, there are recent studies which indicate that gendering processes negatively affect girls’ opportunities to engage in science (Günther-Hanssen et al., 2020), technology (Stephenson et al., 2021) and engineering (Fleer, 2021) in early childhood education.

Overall, when it comes to STEAM, the research literature mainly looks at education for older students, with only a few examples that feature early childhood education (DeJarnette, 2018; Hunter-Doniger, 2021; Magnusson and Bäckman, 2021; Sullivan and Bers, 2018). Although one can assume that STEAM would fit well with the many national early childhood education curricula where arts-integrated education is a core feature (e.g. Hamilton et al., 2019; Kim and Kim, 2017), there is currently a lack of discussion about for whom STEAM in early childhood education is and could be significant. In the literature on arts-integrated pedagogies in early childhood education, we can identify a discursive bias towards arts integration as potentiality, and hence positively loaded possibilities (e.g. Olsson et al., 2015; Vecchi, 2010), where ‘arts’ and STEAM buzzwords such as ‘problem-solving’ and ‘creativity’ are typically treated as gender-neutral. When Hunter-Doniger (2021: 24) concludes that STEAM can be an arena for fostering children's creativity and autonomy, for example, with the latter being defined as the ‘freedom or independence to move, play, think, or create’, she does not mention if and how gender or other norms affect children's opportunities to develop creativity and autonomy. Moreover, the addition of the arts to STEM has been described as especially suitable for early childhood education since young children are believed to have ‘built-in art elements within them’ (Awang et al., 2020: 1071), which conveys the message that STEAM learning is inherently and equally available to all children.

Foreseeing an expansion of STEAM practice and research in early childhood education contexts, we find it urgent, at this early stage, to disrupt the development of a gender-blind STEAM discourse for early childhood education. Instead, we want to highlight how gendering processes matter to children's being and learning in the arts, STEM and STEAM. Assuming that learning and being in the arts and in the STEM disciplines are not equally available for boys and girls, we wonder what will happen when the arts and STEM are combined into STEAM education in early childhood education practice. According to research, the current gender norms connected to STEM and the arts, respectively, mean that certain kinds of children, students, thinking and doing are recognised by teachers and peers, whereas others are not (e.g. Andersson and Gullberg, 2014; Günther-Hanssen et al., 2020; Risner, 2007). What normative constraints do children face when they are expected to engage with the world scientifically, technologically, artistically, engineeringly and mathematically? One possible answer is that, when the normative constraints of each discipline are added onto each other, there is no space left for any child to be and learn. Another possible answer is that STEAM will open up to new ways of being and learning, beyond the current gender norms connected to STEM and the arts. This idea aligns with one of the driving ideas behind STEAM policies – namely, that the immersion of the arts in STEM will transcend the disciplines and generate something profoundly new, with the capacity to foster innovative thinkers for the future (Ingold, 2019).

As we see it, STEAM education harbours the potential to form new and norm-challenging ways of teaching and learning in early childhood. We encourage practitioners and researchers to identify what ways of being and learning are made available to children when STEAM education is implemented in practice, as well as if and how these ways of being and learning break with traditional norms connected to the arts, STEM and gender. In the long run, we hope that practitioners can use STEAM to make way for children, already in early childhood, to participate in education that highlights and queers boundaries between gendered disciplines and identities.