Based on STEAM, in 2018, Jordi Colomer and Teresa Serra publish the first edition of the book entitled “Explora i CreaCiència. Ciència a través del Moviment” (“Explore and CreateScience. Science through Movement”), in collaboration with members of the Moviment Lantana dance company, and of the Department of Specific Didactics of the University of Girona.
STEAM is a term to group different disciplines: Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics. STEAM is typically used when addressing education policy and school curriculum in order to improve competitiveness in science and technology development.
In this publication, the authors compile a series of workshops designed within the framework of the Explora i CreaCiència project. These workshops are detailed below and can be performed in primary schools as an activity of educational innovation. If your school is interested in some of these workshops, please contact jordi.colomer@udg.edu
Explora i CreaCiència is a proposal for the promotion of science and scientific vocations. The objective of Explora i CreaCiència is to encourage the scientific capabilities through the movement in primary school classrooms. The authors understand by movement the proposal of the work of corporal, spatial and visual capacities in relation to the intrapersonal and interpersonal capacities.
The Explora i CreaCiència methodology is based on the so-called fourth culture. The fourth culture places the student at the center of the learning-teaching process and seeks to discover the relationships between the humanities and the sciences. It is an integral, continuous and dynamic process. The fourth culture is based on the inclusive activation of knowledge and capacities of humanistic and scientist fields. The synergy, the mixture of these fields, dominates the application of the fourth culture. The proposal involves the activation of a series of capacities that, together, activate the competencies of the school curriculum. The project activates the competences of the areas of mathematics, of knowledge of the natural, social and cultural environment, of physical education and of artistic education. These competences motivate the definition of a set of classroom activities that attend to a set of specific contents for each of the different levels of primary school. It also involves the definition of a scientific practice and an artistic practice, both based on movement.
Development of primary competencies involves engaging divergent and convergent thoughts and beliefs, implies developing ideas to solve a variety of situations. Explora i CreaCiència proposes to explain these thoughts and beliefs through artistic expression, psychomotricity, and scientific analysis and practice. Therefore, the proposed strategy establishes a new learning that activates the languages of the child in the primary school classroom: how to create with words and how to create with the body, with all kinds of materials, means and scientific tools, both individually and collectively and, as well, how to promote various artistic representations that explain these languages. It also involves evaluating students from individual progress, which accepts error as a driving force of improvement, and accepts the evaluation of that that you learn and that you learn to do.
The Explora i CreaCiència methodology is framed in the models of learning by doing, and the combination of inquiry and reflection. Consequently, the authors propose an exploratory dimensionality based on the proposal of questions (the inquiry), the activation of the individual and group reflection, and the stimulation of active participation of children.
The application of the Explora i CreaCiència project involves enhancing creativity in primary school classrooms in the different evolutionary periods of the students (different levels of primary education). It also implies applying active methodologies, organizing a series of activities that activate cyclical objectives of process, which are based both on the activation of cognitive processes and procedural processes. And, finally, it involves the design of activities carried out in dynamic spaces (of science and of movement). The ultimate goal is to have the will and attitude of wanting to transform the entire ecosystem that pivots around the child, their own and the shared, both in the classroom and at the center, and in the family and social environments.
The approach is scientific, given that the methodology focuses on the experience, on the empirical evidence, on the establishment of categories and paradigms; it is developed through frameworks of reasoning and specification, with a look at pragmatic and innovative practice.
The teacher accompaniment for activating these dynamic methodologies is based on the achievement of four phases: experimenting, conceptualizing, analyzing and applying.
The workshops and the movement concepts developed and explored within the Explora i CreaCiència project are:
- Challenging the gravity
- Experimenting the free fall
- Exploring the pendulum
- Spin around (rotation)
- Generating waves
- Going up and down of inclined planes
This project has been developed with the support of: Patronat Politècnica (Univesity of Girona), Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, and FECYT.