By Jailson Lima
(Chemistry Department, Vanier College, Montreal, QC, Canada)
Creativity has become a buzzword in all fields of knowledge and businesses, specially in the larger-than-life companies that lead technological innovations. However, creativity is an overarching concept that is also applicable to our personal lives: Creative individuals might be better equipped to have more fulfilling life experiences than their not-so-creative peers.
I attended school in Brazil and completed my graduate studies at the University of São Paulo. After teaching chemistry in Brazilian high schools and universities, I moved to Montreal and started teaching at Vanier College, a public CEGEP that offers pre-university courses to students who are mostly 17 to 19 years old. After spending a few years adjusting to my new teaching environment in Canada, I felt a need to reinvent my teaching practice—mostly because I believed that there had to be better approaches than those that I was applying. I did not know exactly which direction this change would take me in until I experienced a “road to Damascus” moment after casually stumbling on Kieran Egan’s The Educated Mind. For me, it was literally a revelation on how creativity and imagination could become powerful tools to support learning. I instantly knew that I wanted to take this new route.
Although imagination and creativity are not synonymous, there is a link between the two. Creativity entails an interaction between attitude, process, and environment that leads to the inception of something new and useful, but to create something, one first needs to imagine it. Imagination is the capacity to conceive of what does not yet exist, and creativity is applied imagination. STEAM pedagogies use Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts, and Mathematics as access points for guiding student inquiry through dialogue and collaboration in an environment that promotes creativity and imagination.
Though my journey is entirely personal, I would like to share my experiences exploring this approach in science courses at Vanier College. It is my hope that sharing them will both provide an inspirational starting point to those who are interested in seeking such approaches in their teaching practice as well as stimulate reflection among those who are curious about this topic.
Creativity and imagination have countless facets and nuances. There is no one-size-fits-all recipe. STEAM has the potential of transforming our schools to fulfill the needs of new generations of students.
So, let’s start the dialogue. Welcome to STEAM chat!
Image: The Doors of Perception by Daisy Zhao http://www.artandchemistry.ca/artwork/1330.html
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