From problem-solving,innovation and creativity to empathy,connection and care? Troubling the use of STEAM buzzwords in early childhood education research

Abstract

There is a growing trend of addressing the benefits of STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics) in literature on Early Childhood Education (ECE). The literature often assumes that adding Arts to STEM in ECE will help young children develop a number of skills such as critical thinking, innovation, creativity, problem-solving, communication and collaboration. We refer to these skills as STEAM buzzwords since they are listed in a recurrent way throughout the literature and are seldom critically assessed or challenged. With this colloquium, we aspire to challenge the use of these buzzwords. The main reason is that three of them, innovation, creativity and problem-solving, carry a gendered and unjust history, associated with white men, progress, economic growth and conquest. We argue that an unreflective use of these buzzwords may steer STEAM education in ECE towards fostering ‘human capital’ rather than enabling children to develop close and empathic relations with organisms and other more than human actors and elements in their surrounding world. Therefore, we invite practitioners and researchers to join us in forming a new set of STEAM buzzwords, a set that is just and apt for all children, and for the world.

In recent years, there has been a rapid increase in articles and book chapters that address the benefits of STEAM in Early Childhood Education (ECE). The STEAM acronym is a combination of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and Arts (dance, drama, music, visual arts) and it was initially formed with higher education levels than ECE in mind. Two of the main rationales behind STEAM education are to foster innovative thinkers who can meet the complex demands of the future in sustainable ways (e.g., Allina, 2018; Ingold, 2019) and to motivate underrepresented groups, particularly girls, to engage with STEM (European Committee of the Regions, 2019; Ng and Ferguson, 2020). The majority of the ECE literature embraces these rationales and share a joint assumption that adding Arts to STEM in ECE will help young children to develop a number of skills. We refer to these skills as STEAM buzzwords since they are listed in a recurrent way throughout the literature and since they seldom are critically assessed or challenged. The most common buzzwords are critical thinking, innovation, creativity, problem-solving, communication and collaboration skills (e.g., Başaran and Bay, 2022; Beisly and Moffitt, 2025; De Jarnette, 2018; Erol et al., 2022; Ganira, 2022; Haugas et al., 2023; Hunter-Doniger, 2021; Mercan and Kandır, 2022; Temiz and Çevik, 2024; Violy, 2024; Yang et al., 2023). The buzzwords are also often associated with so-called twenty-first-century skills, which are seen as essential for children to succeed in the future (e.g., Partnership for 21st Century Learning, 2016; Temiz and Çevik, 2024; Wu, 2023).

With this colloquium, we want to challenge the seemingly unreflective use of these STEAM buzzwords in ECE research. Our main reason is that three of these words, innovation, creativity and problem-solving, carry a gendered and unjust history (e.g., Alsos et al., 2013; Marçal, 2022; Suchman, 2009). These three are often associated with certain people and purposes, such as white men, progress, economic growth and conquest. What has historically been considered as important inventions (in the West), as well as what qualifies as technology and engineering, has systematically excluded women, along with the activities and materials that women traditionally engage in. While hard materials, machines and war-related inventions have been associated with innovation and creativity (e.g., Eekelen, 2017, 2018), soft materials and inventions aimed at support and care have often been categorised differently (e.g., Marçal, 2022). Andersson et al. (2012) explain how traditional ideas of who is innovative and what innovation is make it easier for people to recognise men, high-tech products and traditional industries as innovative than to, for example, recognise innovativeness in ethnic minority women and initiatives for social justice. Therefore, there is a risk that we exclude innovations with potential to reduce poverty and inequalities since ‘they seem unclear (and perhaps also incomprehensible) in relation to what has traditionally been presented as innovation’ (Andersson et al., 2012: 13).

Another problematic aspect of the buzzwords innovation, creativity and problem-solving is that they often are associated with change and progress, signalling that our world is in constant need of improvement (Suchman, 2009, 2011). This means that ideas of innovation, creativity and problem-solving are often intertwined with the exploitation and oppression of animals, natural resources, land and humans in less advantaged positions and parts of the world.

We have previously pointed out the risk that ECE research embraces a gender-blind STEAM discourse (Areljung and Günther-Hanssen, 2022), and we note that there is still a lack of empirical studies that apply in-depth analyses of how gender, ethnicity and social class and other societal factors might affect children's possibilities to participate in STEAM-activities. Instead, it is common to merely state that STEAM in ECE will lead to inclusive teaching and learning where all children will gain these certain skills and can participate on equal terms (e.g., Beisly and Moffitt 2025; Nyaaba et al., 2024; Sikder et al., 2023) without engaging in how. We find it urgent to encourage a discussion about alternative skills that STEAM education should help foster in young children, and how and why such education should be carried out. As we see it, a new set of buzzwords is important both to enable inclusive STEAM education and to steer away from the type of innovation, problem-solving and creativity skills that have led the world in the wrong direction.

Since innovation, creativity and problem-solving have commonly been seen as anthropocentric and individual (male) attributes rather than something that arises in relation to context or in human–non-human entanglements (e.g., Pecis, 2016; Suchman, 2009), there is a risk that STEAM in ECE will be about fostering ‘human capital’ and that the bodies of the STEAM-learners are reduced into sets of attributes (e.g., Takeuchi et al., 2020). In contrast, we propose that the value of adding Arts to STEM in ECE is to enable children to develop close relations with various STEAM phenomena and to ‘feel for the organism’ (Areljung, 2019; 163) and for other more than human actors and elements (e.g., Pacini-Ketchabaw and Clark, 2016). For instance, teachers can put sensing or listening to other actors in the foreground in creative processes (e.g., Günther-Hanssen, 2020; Pacini-Ketchabaw and Clark 2016). Alternative STEAM buzzwords could therefore be about empathy, imagination, sensing, connection and care. We believe that such skills are much more important for young children to meet the complex demands of the twenty-first century, than innovativeness, creativity and problem-solving skills.

We end this colloquium by inviting practitioners and researchers to join us in forming a new set of STEAM buzzwords, one that is just and apt for all children, and for the world today and tomorrow, by:

Interrogating the trope of innovation (Suchman, 2009) by problematizing what we (researchers and teachers) mean when we say that STEAM education will help foster children's creativity, innovation and problem-solving skills.

Rethink how collaboration, innovation, creativity and problem-solving could be emphasized in practice. For example, we might highlight that children need to first form a close relationship with different phenomena in order to actually solve problems.

Encouraging all children to use and feel with and through their whole bodies and senses to create close connections and become (with) the STEAM content, such as seeds, water molecules, air, storms, bodily organs, sewing machines, trampolines, steep slopes, ice and choreographies (Areljung et al., forthcoming).