Integration of Art Pedagogy in Engineering Graduate Education

Abstract

The integration of STEM with the Arts, commonly referred to as STEAM, recognizes the need for human skill, creativity, and imagination in technological innovations and solutions of realworld technical problems. The STEAM paradigm changes the dominant "chalk and talk" lecture and "closed-ended" problem-solving orientation of traditional engineering pedagogy to a handson, studio-based, and open-ended creative learning approach, typical in art education. A growing body of literature has provided evidence of the favorable impact of situating STEAM in K-16 education. The long-term objective of this work is to promote creativity in engineering students by integrating learning methods and environments from the Arts into graduate STEM education. To this end, an integrating engineering, technology and art (ETA) educational model is developed and is currently being tested. This ETA educational model systematically merges technical instruction with studio-based pedagogy. The ETA model consists of three courses, which were piloted in the year 2017. In each course, engineering and art instructors and students collaborated for 15 weeks on design projects. These projects ranged from drones to architectural installations.

Instilling innovation and entrepreneurship in engineering graduate students: Observations at the University of Calgary

“…These also include laboratory design maker spaces and, in some cases, activities working with industry or small and medium enterprise to help find new solutions to challenges. There are many methods and approaches for teaching creativity and innovation that have arisen in the last few decades, including community of practice learning, [3] interdisciplinary cooperation teaching, [4] learning-by-doing, [5] process intensification, [6] outcomebased learning, [7,8] problem-based learning, [9] project-based learning, [10] product-based learning, [11] concept-knowledge theory, [12] research-based learning, [13] design thinking, [14] gamification and game storming, [15,16] Conceive-Design-Implement-Operate (CDIO) approaches, [17][18][19] and entrepreneurial thinking. [20,21] These are all excellent approaches for teaching core engineering material with integrated experiential learning non-technical skills (e.g., team work and creativity) but they still lack in-depth promotion and deliberate inclusion of innovation in their approaches.…”