Energizing science education with the arts

By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO– Congresswoman Susan Davis (D-San Diego) says American educators have a lot to learn from the i-Phone.

“It is the design,” she said.  “If it were just a lot of codes, people wouldn’t want to deal with it.  But what people love about it is all the design.  And that is why we speak about STEAM education, which is STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) with the ‘A’ added in for the Arts.”

By the “Arts,” she hastened to add in a recent interview, she means not only the visual arts, but also the performing arts and writing.

According to Davis, a student might think “well, I don’t want to sit in front of a computer all day long; I don’t want to do this” but, on the other hand, “when you show them that their own talents are relevant, then maybe they will decide to do more in that area.”

Her comment reminded me of the song in the classic Disney movie Mary Poppins about how a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.  The arts can lure creative people into mastering the more difficult subjects of science and technology.

Encouraging innovation in the schools is intended “really to have a collaboration across the board that helps us be better problem solvers and create better jobs for people,” said Davis.

Recently, Davis joined Mike Honda, who is the congressman from the Silicon Valley, and others, in co-sponsoring two pieces of legislation intended to nudge America along the road to learning creativity.

One of the bills, HR 1089, would create within the education department an assistant secretary position, whose occupant would focus exclusively on initiatives aimed at improving America’s competitive position in the  teaching of sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics.  A second Honda bill, HR 1090, would authorize the federal government to provide  grants to STEM coaches whose creative and successful ways of teaching their subjects might be taught to other teachers.

Given that Honda and Davis both are Democrats in a House of Representatives controlled by Republicans, Davis said it is unlikely that either bill will survive in its current “stand-alone” form, but she added that the provisions of these bills might be amended into the reauthorization bills for either the Elementary and Secondary Education Act or for the America Competes Act.

The debate between Democrats and Republicans, she added, isn’t over the advisability of improving STEM education; there is broad agreement on that.  The debate deals with whether the federal government is better equipped to handle such a program, as the Democrats believe, or whether the money for this purpose along with the decision-making  about how it should be spent, should be turned over to the individual states, as is preferred by the Republicans.

Not counting her own years as a student, Davis, who will turn 70 on April 13,  has been involved with the educational system for approximately half her life.  She directed the Aaron Price Fellowship Program–established by Robert and Allison Price in memory of their son– which created a cadre of public school students and exposed them on field trips and in lectures to the behind-the-scenes workings of government and industry.   In 1983, Davis, an active member of the Jewish community, was elected to the San Diego Board of Education, and in 1994, she was elected to the state Assembly.  In 2000, she was elected to the House of Representatives, where she is now in her seventh term.  In both the Legislature and in the Congress, her committee assignments included Education.

Having had so much interaction with school systems, it’s not surprising to hear Davis speak with fondness about different educational institutions in her own backyard of San Diego.

For example, she praises San Diego State University for the way it seeks to integrate seemingly disparate fields of study.  “They are looking at an entrepreneurial minor for graduate students, so if you are a music major maybe you will have a minor in entrepreneurship,” she said.  “If you are in business school, you could do that as well, maybe collaborate with the engineering school.”  She describes herself as an admirer of the robotics competitions for public school students, such as have been hosted by Grossmont College.

Davis said she would like to see subject matters even more creatively integrated in primary and secondary schools.  “Teachers need to be in front of the class occasionally,” but at High Tech High Schools in Point Loma and in Chula Vista,  “most of the time you see kids engaging together” in various projects, she noted approvingly.

“I know that is not unique just to High Tech High,” she added.  “You can look at charter schools downtown–such as the Library School–and they are doing some great things.  There are programs in the Crawford (High School) cluster, and Gompers (Secondary School), of course, was the math and science magnet back to the 1980s.  But I think the integration of these different disciplines is more prominent today.  The challenge is having teachers who know how to do that.”

Davis noted that numerous manufacturing jobs have disappeared in the United States, either because they can be done more inexpensively elsewhere, or because automation has made such  jobs unnecessary.

“We  have plenty of robots, or whatever, to do that work; we need the brains behind all that and we won’t have to worry that jobs will be outsourced or gone,” she said.  “If students have the ability to think across disciplines and apply their engineering skills, their artistic skills, their math, their science to solving problems, that is where we can really excel.”

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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World.  He may be contacted at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com

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